Pane e Vino

Among the tastiest restaurants in Baltimore's Little Italy is Cafe Gia. Owned by Gia Fracassetti with husband Gianfranco in the kitchen, they produce fresh and flavorful Italian cuisine. We highly recommend the place, but if you're more in the mood for a drink and something more akin to small plates, pop next door to Pane e Vino.

Pane e Vino, or bread and wine, is owned by Gia's brother, Steven, but it's still very much a Fracassetti collaboration; Gian created the bar's menu, and Gia helped with the interior design. The space itself is quite small and very intimate, and feels like a really chic private club.

Mr Minx and I recently attended a media tasting for an introduction to the bar's cocktails and several types of snacks.

Mini burrata, fava, prosciutto, and tomato salad.

With our first cocktail, the Spicy Sicilian (pepper vodka, limoncello, kumquat syrup, lemon), we were brought dishes of Pane e Vino's burrata with tomatoes, fava beans, and prosciutto, and calamari cooked en sous vide with broccoli rabe and tomatoes in a savory broth, with toasted bread on the side. Both were delicious. I'm a big fan of creamy, rich, burrata cheese, and thought the small ball was the perfect size for one (or two, if I am feeling generous but probably not).

Sous vide calamari, rapini, tomatoes

The calamari was silky and tender and the bitter rapini was a nice accent. I was rather annoyed, however, that I had to share this lovely dish with two other people and didn't have it and a plate of toast all to myself.

Porcini, prosciutto, and gorgonzola flatbread

We then sampled a flatbread. Not particularly flat, the focaccia-based treat was generously portioned and definitely enough for two or three. The salty combination of gorgonzola and prosciutto worked very well as an accompaniment to an alcoholic beverage or two, like the Charm City Girl (MD's own Sloop Betty vodka, fresh grapefruit, ginger syrup, club soda), Redheads Have More Fun (tequila, blood orange, ginger beer, lime), or a Smooth Country Ride (cognac, anisette, lemon, rhubarb black pepper syrup).

Chicken drumsticks, homemade spicy harissa, bleu cheese and celery

Rather than the usual chicken wings, Pane e Vino serves chicken drumsticks, cooked until delightfully moist and juicy, and generously sauced with a fiery harissa. Those of us who favor heat enjoyed the spicy and flavorful legs on their own, but the faint of heart will appreciate the cooling nature of the accompanying celery sticks and bleu cheese dressing.

Giant buffalo/ricotta meatball with rustic garlic toast

What we tried so far was really quite nice, but my favorite dishes were yet to come. The giant meatball of lean bison made moist and super tender by ricotta cheese reminded me of the amazing meatballs made by my late Aunt Stasia. So good! And while the garlic toast sopped up the sauce perfectly, Mr Minx was not so secretly hankering for a big pile of spaghetti, instead.

Piadina with grilled steak, Stracchino, arugula, harissa, pickled onions.

The piadine, stuffed with steak and a type of creamy young cow's-milk cheese called Stracchino resembled quesadillas. A piadina, or piada, is a thin rustic flatbread, reminiscent of pita, roti, or lavash, which is served rolled or stuffed with cheese and other ingredients. I loved the bite of the harissa with the steak, cooled down by the creamy cheese.

Nutella bread pudding, banana ice cream

Finally, we had dessert--a simple but decadent Nutella bread pudding. Not just Nutella-flavored, there was also a ribbon of the gooey chocolate hazelnut spread inside. The banana ice cream was good, but not really even necessary. More bread pudding, please.

More of everything, actually. It was all really delicious, from cocktails to sweets. We look forward to going back and sampling more of both food and beverage. And maybe another of those terrific meatballs (or two).





Posted on Minxeats.com.

Meyer Lemon Salsa

Up until this point, I had never tasted a Meyer lemon. I had read about them repeatedly, how they were sweeter and less tangy than regular lemons, but hadn't even seen them in the store. Then, on a recent trip to Wegman's, I discovered bags of the fruits in their voluminous produce department and tossed one in the cart.

Now the question was: What to do with five Meyer lemons? 

The rind of Lemon One went into both an apple galette and a garnish for some Parisian gnocchi I made for dinner one night. Another piece of that rind went into the bag I used to sous vide some pork tenderloins, along with salt, pepper, and pinches of onion and garlic powder. The flesh of the lemon was squeezed into a glass of mighty tasty Meyer lemonade.

That left four Meyer lemons. I consulted this LA Times list, "100 Things to do with a Meyer lemon," which encouraged me to find Suzanne Goin's recipe for Meyer lemon salsa. I found an adapted version, which I adapted further. You know, because I can't ever follow a recipe to the letter...I have to make everything mine. 

Goin's salsa recipe, kind of a gremolata on steroids, calls for raw shallot, which is macerated in Champagne vinegar for a few minutes before adding the other ingredients. I felt the combination might be too sharp, so I cooked the shallot until just translucent. The combination of shallot, lemon, and a ton of parsley was delicious, and perfect with the subtly lemon-infused flavors of the fork-tender 135° pork tenderloin.

There are two lemons left. Any suggestions?

Meyer Lemon Salsa
Adapted from Sunday Suppers at Lucques by Suzanne Goin

2 tablespoons finely diced shallot
olive oil
2 large Meyer lemons
1/2 cup green olives pitted and chopped
4 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons champagne vinegar
1 teaspoon agave syrup or honey
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cook shallot in a tiny bit of olive oil until translucent. Remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature.

Remove both ends from the lemon and cut the remaining part, including peel, into small dice. Put in a bowl with the olives, parsley, and cooled shallot.

Whisk together the vinegar, agave syrup, and olive oil. Toss with lemon mixture. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper.



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Sous Vide Chicken

After owning the SousVide Supreme™ for several months now and not really using it all that often, I thought it was time to change that. Our freezer is full of all sorts of sous-vide-able meats - pork belly, beef heart, boneless leg of lamb - but it was high time to try chicken. Boneless, skinless, flavorless chicken breasts, to be exact. I checked out the optimal temperature for cooking chicken in a water bath, marinated a couple of BSCBs, and commenced to cooking.

The result: the most tender, juicy, and flavorful chicken breasts I have ever eaten. The meat had a subtle garlic flavor from the marinade, and really didn't need the sauce I made for it at all, except to make it pretty (in other words, hide its naked ugliness).

I can't picture myself using any other method for chicken breasts from now on.

Sous Vide Chicken with Leeks and Red Curry Peanut Sauce

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon lemongrass paste

Combine ingredients in a zip top bag. Marinate for at least 6 hours or overnight.

When ready to cook, preheat water oven to 140°F. Remove chicken from marinade and pat dry. Place each breast in its own quart-sized sous-vide bag, or use a half-gallon bag for both, and vacuum seal. Cook in water oven for at least 1 hour 35 minutes and up to 10 hours.

Leeks

2 leeks, light green parts only, halved, sliced, and well-rinsed
1 cup chicken stock
olive oil or butter
salt and pepper to taste

Place leeks in a sauce pan with the stock. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and cook at a simmer until leeks are very tender, about one hour. Bring back to a boil to cook off any remaining stock. Remove from heat. Add a bit of butter or olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

Red Curry Peanut sauce

Red curry paste
3 tablespoons peanut butter
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon lemongrass paste
1 garlic clove, minced

Combine all ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and cook until thickened slightly, about 10 minutes.

Serve chicken on a bed of leeks, napped with sauce. Or vice versa.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Sous Vide Lamb with Lemony Tomato Pepper Relish

We're on a roll at Casa Minx! After successfully making salmon in the Sous Vide Supreme, we tried some meat! Nothing fancy, just some lamb shoulder on the bone. It was cheap--if it got messed up somehow, there'd be no great investment lost--and Ms Minx was feeling vaguely Moroccan; lamb would go perfectly with her tomato and pepper relish accented with preserved lemon.

The meat was cooked to medium and then given a quick turn in the broiler. It wasn't as tender as expected, but it was certainly easy, and apart from throwing out a piece of foil, cleanup was quick. That's a real benefit to using the Sous Vide Supreme - no roasting pans or pots to scrub!

Sous Vide Lamb

1.5 lbs lamb shoulder steaks (may also use leg meat, cut into slabs 3/4" - 1" thick)
2 cloves garlic
pinch smoked paprika
salt and pepper
canola oil

Pat lamb pieces dry and place in a large sous vide bag. Add garlic, sprinkle with paprika, salt, and pepper. Vacuum seal bag and hold in refrigerator until ready to cook. Preheat Sous Vide Supreme to 120F/49C for rare, 134F/56.5C for medium rare, 140F/60C for medium. (If you want the meat more well done, there's no reason at all to deal with sous vide. Merely overcook it using your favorite method.) Submerge bag of lamb and cook in the water bath for 2 hours and up to 4 hours.

Lamb right out of the vacuum bag. Notice that it's a nice medium pink.

Preheat broiler. Remove lamb from plastic bag and place on a foil-lined baking sheet. Broil on one side for 2-3 minutes until browned.

Serve with Lemony Tomato Pepper Relish and orzotto. Serves 2-6, depending on the proportion of bone to meat in your lamb.

Lemony Tomato Pepper Relish

1 red, yellow, or orange bell pepper
3/4 cup sun dried tomatoes, cut into strips
1/2 sweet onion, cut into very thin slices
olive oil
salt
1 small clove of garlic, minced
1/4 cup preserved lemon, very finely chopped (or, the flesh and finely minced zest of half a fresh lemon)
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon ancho chile pepper
1 teaspoon aleppo pepper
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons agave syrup or honey (or to taste)
salt and pepper

Roast bell pepper over an open flame to char the skin all over. Put pepper in a paper bag and set aside to cool. When cool, rub off skin, remove seeds and stem, and dice flesh. Set aside.

Put sun dried tomatoes in a small saucepan with about half a cup of water (more if tomatoes are very dry). Bring to a boil then lower heat. Simmer until tomatoes are soft, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and allow tomatoes to come to room temperature. Drain off any excess liquid and process tomatoes to a paste in a food pro or mini prep. Set aside.

Cook onion in a splash of olive oil and a pinch of salt over low heat until very soft and slightly caramelized, about 20 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook an additional 2 minutes. Add sundried tomato paste, preserved lemon, paprika, ancho, and aleppo pepper and stir well to combine. Stir in vinegar and agave syrup and taste for seasoning. You don't want the condiment to be sweet or sour, but the flavors should be balanced. Season to taste with salt and pepper, remove from heat, and refrigerate until ready to use.

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Sous Vide Salmon

So I finally got the courage to cook a meat protein in the Sous Vide Supreme. While my initial experiments with eggs and vegetables were somewhat successful (and somewhat unsuccessful), I'm going to boldly declare that my experiment with salmon was mostly successful.

It's rare that we've managed to cook salmon properly at home. It's a fatty fish that shouldn't dry out easily, but somehow we either grossly over- or under-cook it. Conventional poaching has so far been the most successful cooking method we've tried, but I thought sous vide could be even better. Rather than just plop some salmon in a bag and have at it, I first did some research. I found this blog post regarding brine and cooking temperatures to be very interesting and inspiring. Apparently a brine prevents the excretion of albumen, that white fatty-looking stuff that oozes out of proteins like salmon and chicken breast during cooking. It's a fabulous idea, but I didn't really want to waste a cup and a half of kosher salt on cooking two pieces of salmon. It's just not cost effective. Why not just generously salt the meat ahead of time and rinse off the salt before cooking? Another thing I decided to change was the cooking temperature. While 50-53C seems to be the most popular suggestions, I cranked the machine up to 60C because I just don't like the flavor of raw salmon. Tuna, fine. Salmon, no.

So...I bought two large salmon filets at the grocery store because they were on sale. After removing the skin and cutting each of them in half width-wise, I sprinkled about a teaspoon of coarse Kosher salt over both sides of each piece. After about 45 minutes, I rinsed off the salt, patted the fish dry, and vacuum-sealed the pieces in two bags with a tablespoon of butter in each. After a quick 25 minute bath in 60C water, the salmon was what I consider perfectly cooked. It was moist and flaky and had exactly the right amount of salt. Even two days later, after a couple minutes in the microwave to heat through, the leftovers were moist and juicy. My only issue with the fish was that it seemed to be extra, well, fishy in flavor. Perhaps because all of the meaty juices are retained in sous vide cooking; there's no other liquids to dilute the salmon's oils, nor are they burned off in cooking. Or perhaps this particular fish just had more flavor. In any case, it made me wonder if chicken breasts aren't the perfect protein for sous vide. If the process can keep them tasting as chicken-y as possible, that can only be a good thing, right?

More experiments forthcoming.

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Cookin' With...Water

As I posted a while ago, I am now the proud owner of a SousVide Supreme. The manufacturer, Eades, calls it a "water oven," which I suppose is more accurate than "immersion circulator," which is what Top Chef and Iron Chef fans may be more familiar with. The modernist cuisine (today's favored term for "molecular gastronomy") technique of sous vide is a method of cooking food--sealed in plastic bags--in a water bath. Yes, I suppose folks have been cooking their Green Giant broccoli in cheese sauce that way for a long time already, but that's really just defrosting/warming and not really cooking. The term "sous vide" (soo VEED) actually refers to the vacuum-sealing of the food, not the cooking process itself, but has come to be used for both. In any case, the SousVide Supreme is basically a rectangular chamber rigged to maintain the constant temperature of water placed within it.

Sous vide cooking is especially good for proteins, which can be cooked to their ideal temperature of doneness without fear of overcooking. For example, if beef is perfectly medium-rare at 132F, and it is prepared at 132F, it can never reach temperatures of 140F or over and become overcooked. While I've tried cooking soft-boiled eggs in the SVS, I'm still a little intimidated about the idea of cooking meat in it. So...in my next attempt at using the thing, I cooked...vegetables.

The SousVide Supreme Web site offered an interesting-sounding salad of fennel and apples, so I gave that a whirl.

Using the vacuum sealer on the apples. Not a good idea, since the
sealer sucked the marinade out of the bag and all over the place.

Because I couldn't suck the air out of the bags, and apples and fennel aren't heavy, the bags floated in the water bath despite my attempts at weighting them down or using the rack that came with the device. (I need to buy a brick for doing this kind of thing in the future.) Eventually, I managed to get both bags mostly submerged and cooked the items for the requisite hour.

I skipped the greenery part of the salad and just served the apples and fennel with bleu cheese. It tasted pretty good, but the texture was a bit soft. Now I'm thinking I should have just run the fruit and veg through the blender and made a lovely purée of it. Next time....

Also next time...I need to get brave enough to cook meat. Maybe salmon.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.

Bacon and Eggs

Here ya go, Ginger. :)

Recently I got a SousVide Supreme™ water oven to play with. Unlike the large, two-piece "immersion circulators" seen on Iron Chef and Top Chef, the SousVide Supreme™ is a completely self-contained unit that carefully controls the temperature of water placed within it. I gotta admit - I'm a little intimidated by it. It just seems too easy, you know?

So I tried something easy-peasy. A poached egg.

Serious Eats' Kenji Lopez-Alt recommends poaching eggs at 142ºF, while the manufacturers of my machine recommend 147º. I decided to compromise and use 144º. Turns out 147º was what I wanted, as my egg whites were a bit...snotty. Not a problem - I poured them out of the shells into ramekins and nuked them for 15 seconds to set the whites.

As an accompaniment to my poached eggs - or vice versa - I made some risotto with bacon. Crush has offered a completely-irresistible bacon-and-eggs risotto in the past, which I attempted to recreate, using brown Carnaroli rice instead of the usual white Arborio.

I had played with this brown rice in the past and ended up with unpleasantly chewy risotto. (I don't like brown rice, so I'm not sure why I bought it in the first place.) This time, I parcooked the rice for a bit, which helped the texture quite nicely. The result was still a bit on the bouncy-side, but was extremely creamy, as a proper risotto should be.

Bacon Risotto with Poached Egg and Asparagus

4 eggs
1 1/2 cups brown carnaroli rice and 3 cups water
OR 1 1/2 cups regular arborio or carnaroli rice
5 cups low-salt chicken broth
3 tablespoons bacon fat
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons finely grated Parmesan cheese
6 slices of cooked bacon, crumbled into large pieces
1/4 lb asparagus spears, peeled, cooked, and cut into 2" lengths
salt and pepper
Additional finely grated Parmesan cheese (for garnish)

Preheat water oven to 147°F. Place eggs in water bath and cook at least 45 minutes, and up to 4 hours. Or, soft boil or poach conventionally.

Put the rice and 3 cups of water into a 2-quart saucepan. Bring to a boil and then turn down to a simmer. Simmer for about 15 minutes, until the rice starts to get tender. Drain rice well. (If using conventional short-grained rice, skip this step.)

Wipe the starch out of the rice pot and put the chicken broth in it; keep at a low simmer on the stove.

Heat bacon fat in a large sauté pan. Add onions and cook over medium heat until soft and just beginning to brown. Add rice to pan and stir well for a minute or two to coat with bacon fat. Add wine, stirring until absorbed. Add warm broth to pan about 1/2 cup at a time, stirring until each addition is absorbed. Repeat until rice is tender but still a little firm to the bite and sauce is creamy. This will take about 25-30 minutes. (With the brown rice, you will probably  use all 5 cups of stock). Add butter, Parmesan, all but one tablespoon of bacon, and asparagus. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper.

Remove eggs from water bath. Gently peel eggs. If for some reason they are too soft, pour them into a ramekin, cover with a bit of plastic wrap, and microwave for 6-10 seconds.

To serve: Place risotto in a bowl; top with additional Parmesan. Place a poached egg on top and season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Garnish with reserved bacon.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.