ABOUT THE GLOBAL PANTRY COOKBOOK: James Beard cookbook-award-winning authors Ann and Scott explore the exciting range of versatile, short-cut, high-flavor ingredients in the global pantry: gochujang, toasted sesame oil, Banyuls vinegar, za’atar, palm sugar, sorghum, chipotles in adobo and many more. These easily found products burst with flavors that Americans have come to love in restaurants in recent years—and are hugely useful for home cooking. Ann and Scott tasted and tested more than 100 pantry stars to find the best for both traditional recipes (such as Grilled Pork Satay from Indonesia) and for playful mashups like their Ground Beef Bulgogi Sloppy Joes with Fiery Napa Slaw and their Coconutty Banana Pudding with Candied Black Walnuts. The book provides in-depth shopping and storage advice, has many tips to ensure recipe success, and suggests alternative uses for each product.
Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/3SNLD3F
The Global Pantry Cookbook, released in October, appeared on best-of-2023 lists by Food & Wine, national NPR, the LA Times, Wired and more, and was recently selected to be recommended for all US libraries as one of just 12 cookbooks from 2023 “that will stand the test of time, become reliable favorites, and nourish readers.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Ann Taylor Pittman and Scott Mowbray are long-time food-writing partners. Ann has won two James Beard Foundation Awards, one for her magazine writing at Cooking Light, and one, with Scott, for co-authoring The New Way to Cook Light cookbook. Ann worked at Cooking Light magazine for more than 20 years, rising to be Food Editor and overseer of the development of thousands of recipes in the magazine’s test kitchen. She is now a freelance writer and recipe developer for outlets such as Food & Wine, Southern Living and Kitchn. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Scott has been a national magazine editor, group editor with Time Inc., columnist, book author, editorial strategist and restaurant reviewer. He was Editor of Cooking Light from 2009 to 2014, and now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Ann is on Instagram @anntaylorpittman and Scott is on Instagram at @scottmowb. For more about the cookbook, go to www.globalpantrycookbook.com
Hi my name is uh Scott Mo and I am the co-author of this the uh Global Pantry cookbook and my fellow co-author an Taylor Pitman is going to take you through the first recipe in just a second but we thought it might be a good
Idea to talk for a moment about the idea behind the recipes and behind the book that idea is really simple it’s that there is a global Pantry out there filled with high flavor shortcut ingredients which work their magic not just in the aines they were developed for but in all kinds of
Recipes now these ingredients have flavors that a lot of American Cooks have absolutely fallen in love with over the last 10 or 20 years even if they’re not necessarily cooking with all of them and that’s because of the amazing proliferation of uh great restaurants across the country not just the big
Cities uh things like Asian restaurants Indian Middle Eastern European South American Mexican that sort of thing what these ingredients have in common almost entirely is that they’re pre-industrial some of them date back thousands of years uh and then what that means is that at the time when Cooks had to
Preserve flavors they were using techniques that we now think of as art artisanal although I’m sure our ancestors would laugh at that term things like smoking drying salting uh sugaring uh spicing and of course the great one fermentation what those techniques did was not just preserve flavors but
Transmute them deepen them enrich them bring out the amami all that exciting stuff that makes them high flavor uh and shortcut ingredients now the good news is that these ingredients are more and more available than they ever have been they’re creeping more and more into the uh International product shelves of
Regular supermarkets uh they are of course in the stores that are aimed at Cooks of immigrant ancestry because it was immigrant cooks that brought these gifts over to this country in the first place but the big change has been the Internet it’s absolutely exploded the availability of these ingredients you
Can get virtually anything you see here brought to your doorstep in a day or two now the first ingredient uh from the global Pantry that we’re going to cook with is oyster sauce and oyster sauce will be familiar to anybody who’s eaten in a Cantonese or some other Chinese
Restaurants and had stir fry that sort of sweet slightly Oceanic Umami flavor comes often from oyster sauce what you want to make sure you’re doing as a cook though is get the good stuff we taste a lot of oyster sauces and found quite a few of them wanting the way to do that
Is simply to look at the ingredient label make sure that oysters or oyster extract are the first or possibly second ingredient on the list uh water could be the first one um this is an example of a very good oyster sauce it’s called leeum key premium oyster sauce it’s
Interesting oyster sauce is not made by pureeing a bunch of oysters it’s made by taking oyster broth and then reducing it down until it gains this deep rich brown Umami character and that’s certainly what you get in this one hi I’m an I’m Scott’s co-author and I’m
Going to show you how to make this recipe this is our chuck roast with frot vegetables and oyster sauce gravy and it’s a great example of how adding just one simple Global Pantry ingredient can elevate a dish and deepen the flavors like you wouldn’t imagine it’s a pot
Roast it’s something we’re all familiar with but we have two tricks that make it standout so one thing we’re doing with this recipe is we’ve adapted it just slightly because we got such beautiful vegetables from Melissa’s we have some rainbow onions that we’ll use we have these rose gold
Baby potatoes some beautiful carrots multicolored pearl onions and turnips so I’ll start this recipe by seasoning this pot roast with salt and pepper just very simple now our recipe calls for a 3 lb pot roast we could find one quite that big so we have two pieces here that
Equal 3 lb and that’s fine do what you got to do to get where you need to be so I’m just sprinkling with salt pretty generous amount of salt and some fresh black [Applause] pepper and then I’ll season the other side and then I’ll carry this over to
The stove top where I will Brown the roast okay so I have a dutch oven heated here with some olive oil in the pan and I’m just going to add the roast and get it nice and brown I want to cook it for at least 5 minutes on
Each side to ensure that it gets nice and brown because Browning equals flavor in the finished dish so while this is going I’m going to go prep some other things while the meat is Browning I’m going to slice up some onions I’m just grabbing a yellow and white one that’s
What I’m feeling right now and I just want to peel these I’ll cut it in half vertically peel off and then these are just going to simply be sliced into thick pieces you don’t have to try to get these very thin because they’re going to cook for a long time and that’s
Intentional we’re going to cook these Al with the meat for in total about 4 hours and what’s going to happen and I’m cutting these vertically if you cut them this way they might just kind of completely disintegrate they will mostly soften and get very buttery and sort of
Meld with the sauce as they cook for that long time and that’s going to be wonderful so we’re using onions in two ways we have these large onions that are going in right now and then the pearl onions will go in later and I’ll explain a little more about that when we get
There okay and then before I return back to to the stove I’m just going to stir together the sauce I have some unsalted beef stock and we call for that here because we’re adding oyster sauce it’s our secret ingredient our Global Pantry star the oyster sauce has a a fair
Amount of sodium in it it has a real salty flavor so we don’t want to overpower uh with salt so we’re using unsalted beef stock just going to whisk that together and as everything Cooks this is going to smell Divine you’re not going to believe it and it’s going to
Make everything taste beefy and delicious okay so I’m going to check on the meat and make sure that it’s gotten nicely Brown and let’s see woo that looks good okay so I want to get it equally Brown on the other side I’ll let that go for another 5
Minutes or so now it’s time to get this roast ready to go in the oven so here’s that liquid I’ve mixed together of the beef stock and the oer sauce just going to pour that in bubble up I’m going to check in some time sprig I like to use fairly large thy
Sprigs and here’s one thing I’ll say for a recipe like this or a soup that’s going to cook for a long time I like to use thy sprigs because you’ll get all that flavor and you don’t have to mess with tediously picking off the leaves I’m also going to tuck in some
Bay leaves for some extra woodsy flavor and then just these are the onions that I sliced and then I have a bunch of garlic that’s just just going to get scattered over the top then I will sort of distribute that cover with the lid take it over to the to the oven it’s
Going to cook at 325 for about 2 hours and 45 minutes it’s about Midway through the cooking point of the roast I’m just going to check check and make sure the liquid looks okay now Scott has found that at high altitude sometimes the liquid bubbles away uh a little more
Than we want and I think this looks like it might need just a splash so I’m just going to pour in just a little bit not too much just to ensure that we have plenty of gravy at the end I’ll pop this back in the oven so now I’ll prep all these gorgeous
Vegetables from Melissa’s I’m going to start with these little pearl onions I’m going to just simply slice off both ends and then cut down through about one layer of the flesh there and then I can peel it away now you can also do that trick where you
Blanch these you cook them in boiling water for about 20 seconds remove them and then you can cut the top off and kind of Squirt them through um squirt the peeled onion through and you’re left with a peel in your hand but you know the roast is cooking for a while I kind
Of like this kind of meditative kitchen work so I’m going to do these by hand so now we’ll prep some of these turnips I like to peel these guys I’m going to slice off the ends first and then I peel them because sometimes that peel can be kind of
Bitter so I’m just going to get the peel off and then I’m going to cut these into you can either cut them into 2in CH chunks or cut them into wedges I like wedges so I’m going to do some wedges so cut in half always like to cut in half cut in
Half again cut in half this one’s kind of big cut that into thirds cut in half half thirds this one looks a little big go back to that one I love turnips that you know if you have picky eaters in your house uh you can probably get turnips past them they’ll think they’re
Potatoes um but they have a really kind of once they’re cooked um they have a sweet kind of mildly earthy flavor that’s really delicious on to the carrots now just going to Simply peel them and I want to cut them into two roughly 2 in chunks big enough so that
They have some presence on the plate okay trim off the ends cut into yeah about 2 in pieces any pieces that end up being kind of big and thick like this I’m going to cut them in half vertically just so they’re not too too big so I’ve got pieces about like that
The last ones to prep are these little potatoes so our recipe actually calls for fulls size or adult um Yukon Gold potatoes we’re using the baby potatoes here which work beautifully I’m just going to cut them in half and now you’ve probably noticed by now that the roast
Is in the oven and the vegetables are not and that’s by Design so I said that there are two keys that make this pot roast recipe stand out and this is one of them the roast itself takes about 4 hours to reach premium succulents and tenderness if you cook these vegetables
For 4 hours they would turn to Mush so the key is to add them later add them with only about an hour and 15 minutes left in the cook time I’ve just pulled the roast out of the oven it’s gone for 2 hours and 45 minutes I’m going to uncover it and take
A look now we’re cooking at high altitude and liquid just does weird things at high altitude I think that a little bit too much of it has cooked off so I’m going to add another Splash just to make sure we have enough to fully cook the vegetables so I’m just adding some more
Beef broth here also one of my best tip this is going to have to go back in the oven this pot is very hot so here’s one of my favorite tips that I’ve learned through unfortunate trial and error when you’re going to have to touch a hot pot again
Put your pot holders or kitchen towel there to remind you that it is hot keep it there okay now I’m just going to add all these vegetables they’re just going to pile on top of the roast these beautiful root veggies and don’t worry that there’s not
Going to be submerged in liquid we don’t want them submerged in liquid there’s going to be enough going on here enough heat and enough steam coming up to cook the vegetables okay I’m going to cover it it’s going to cook now for about an hour and 15
Minutes okay it’s time for the big reveal the roast is done woo all right this looks good now at this point the vegetables have not been mixed with the sauce so they might seem undone so just test them oh know they’re done they’re perfect
Okay so what I’m going to do now is kind of fish around in the bottom for the roast I’m going to try to pull that out now it might fall apart a little bit because it’s very very tender and that’s okay you have to pull it apart at some point to serve
It look at that oh goodness gracious that is just Divine okay yeah it’s coming in pieces again it’s okay and now I’m just going to stir the vegetables with the gravy so we didn’t have a ton of liquid in here when we started and that’s because we want gravy
We want it to be concentrated we don’t want it to be soupy it smells so beefy that’s the thing is this is cooking you know it takes a long time to cook and you don’t mind because it smells so good the whole time and then you can just season a
Little to taste I know that I like a little bit more salt at this point okay this is fantastic I’ll just scoop these veggies onto the platter with the roast look at that wow all these gorgeous root vegetables they’re now glossy and coated they are delicious I have a few more veggies in
The pot but I’m just going to stop there and admire this gorgeous just hunk now you don’t need a steak knife with this this meat is super tender and here we go you guys the oyster sauce makes all the difference it just adds this Savory depth but there’s a tiny bit of
Sweetness that just enhances everything it’s really delicious so we’re going to move on to dried mushrooms as our next uh Global Pantry uh star um we originally used porini mushrooms in the recipe that Ann is going to show you but Melissa’s also sent us some dried chantells and they
Sent us some dried morals we found that they all worked beautifully as you know the thing about um dried mushrooms is this incredible concentration that comes from the drying uh product you’re process you’re talking about delicious mushrooms in the first place they’re reduced down to almost leathery little
Bits and strips but they’re just packed with this kind of forest floor just deliciousness and the great thing is when you reconstitute them as you know you don’t just get these chewy bits of delicious mushroom but you also get this this liquor this water that comes from
The soaking process we use both of those things plus another trick to take the mushroom flavor in this dish way up there I’ll show you how to make this recipe and I’m going to read the title so I get it right it’s super mushroomy tiny pasta cooked creamy like risotto
But easier this is a technique that Scott learned from Mark bitman and it’s an easier way to arrive at the joys and pleasures of risoto uh because you’re working with pasta instead of rice now our recipe in the book calls for dried porini mushrooms Melissa sent us some lovely dried Chantell and morel
Mushrooms as well and we tried it all ways and it’s any of these would be delicious so feel free to change it up now dried mushrooms are key here because anytime you dry something you suck out the water and what’s left is the concentrated essence of that ingredient
That’s why dried mushrooms are great here we’re going to show you how to use them to their full effect now I said that this recipe is a little easier than risoto because you’re cooking pasta in the style of Rota instead of rice and the pasta we love to use the most is a
Cheni de Pepe it is this tiny little pebbly pasta uh it can sometimes be tricky to find so if you cannot find it use orzo orzo works great it’s just going to take a little bit longer to cook now aside from the mushrooms our other Global Pantry ingredient that makes this dish
Super delicious is Marsala oops uh forgot to talk about the marsala when I was doing those U Pantry uh videos um but here it is so marsala is a fortified Sicilian red wine it’s kind of like a Pao cortado cherry or a dry madira quite
A bit of body but quite dry you want to in fact buy the dry designation the superior uh designation as you can see on this label it’s been aged 30 months in barrels it’s only about $16 a bottle at my local store and it is the essence of sunbaked
Mediterranean fruit it is as delicious for the cook as it is for the recipe here’s the star of the show these are dried Chantell mushrooms our recipe calls for Pini we’re using Chantell today and we’re going to roughly divide the package in half we’re using half an
Ounce a little goes a long way and half of them we’re going to reconstitute in water we’re going to speed that process up by microwaving this for 2 minutes microwaving on high for 2 minutes so I’ll do that in a second the other half is going to go into a mini
Food processor to get pulverized into a powder okay that should be about good let’s see oh yeah there a little bit of mushroom dust that comes up it smells super earthy like like a woodsy forest I’m just going to pour this in here so you can see the texture it’s
Pretty powdery but there are still some small little Flakes and chunks that’s fine it’s all going to get cooked together it’s going to be great okay that be means the microwave is done so here you can see the liquid is already turned a little bit Brown that means it’s extracting that goodness from
The mushrooms we’re going to use that liquid don’t you dare throw it away it’s time to get started cooking and I’ve got everything lined up here so that it’s all within reach I’m going to start by melting some some butter I’m using a just a non-stick skillet get that butter going I’m over
Medium heat it’s already starting to Brown a little which I’m not mad at that’s always delicious then I’m going to add in this is half of an onion a medium onion that I chopped very finely I’m just going to let that go until it starts to soft
Now we going to add some sliced fresh mushrooms we’ll have those dried mushrooms going in later but we also have some fresh ones in for that kind of meaty texture now that the mushrooms have softened I’m going to add those mushrooms that we rehydrated in the
Water and all that liquid that liquid is delicious there’s here’s the mushroom powder that we blitzed in the food processor and then here’s the pasta this is a one PB box of pasta I’m just using 12 oz I’ve poured some of it out already and then I want this to just
Bubble pretty energetically and stir until the liquid is absorbed yeah now all add this white wine I want to cook that until it evaporates and is absorbed see it bubbling now I’ll start adding the unsalted chicken stock I have four cups here I’ll just add a little bit at a
Time and this is very similar to the process you use when making risotto with our boreo or other type of medium grain rice you want to add the liquid a little bit out of time and stir to kind of agitate the grains or in this case the pasta that’s going to release starch
Into the liquid and that’s what makes it creamy so let it absorb add a little more stir stir and you want to keep going this way until the liquid is mostly absorbed it’s going to take somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes so just continue like this and
We found that working with pasta this way is a lot more forgiving than working with rice it just takes to the liquid better it is just more forgiving all of the stock has gone in been absorbed you can see that the pasta has plumped up you know I should have
Mentioned that if you’d like to make this a vegetarian dish you could use store-bought vegetable stock or mushroom broth those would be wonderful additions here so this is looking good it is creamy the pasta is alente I’m just going to turn the heat off and finish with some salt for seasoning you can
Always add to taste and then I have some fresh thyme and this is an optional ingredient but one that we highly recommend it’s dry marsala and those finishing touches are just going to add these pops of bright flavor I’m super excited to Dish this up and taste it it smells so Heavenly just
Mushroomy a little bit buttery that marsala adds just notes of kind of raisiny depth I know that might not sound right but that’s exactly what it is okay going to finish with a few grinds of fresh black pepper and some Parmesan cheese maybe a little more and now it’s time to dig
In oh it’s like mushroom lovers you have to have this it’s so good the dried mushrooms have a lot of depth the fresh M mushrooms give that sort of meaty texture oh my gosh it’s heaven now this next recipe has a quartet of global Pantry stars in it and
Um the first one is oyster sauce we’ve already talked about that the second one is uh sesame oil now if you’ve just had generic uh Supermarket sesame oil you’re in for a real treat when you taste the the good Korean SES sesame oil it is so
Nutty it’s so toasty and roasty it’s so uh silky in its texture a few drops can transform a dish this is a couple of brands that we like this one’s called oood it says right on it rich and toasty flavor and that’s indeed what it has this one is called
Otagi uh premium roasted sesame oil they’re both very good and there are some other good ones just look for a slightly higher price on the higher quality oil the third ingredient is in this quartet is um fish sauce now long time ago I was taken to a fish sauce tasting
With a famous national uh Gourmet a food expert in Thailand he was actually a member of the royal family there a prince in fact and I went in we drove down to this little village on the coast in Thailand and tasted eight or 10 um fish sauces made by small little village
Manufacturers and I went in thinking ah you know fish sauce it’s pungent it’s salty it’s fishy and that’s about it uh I came out um realizing that I was an idiot U and that in fact this is one of the richest sources of sort of oceanic omami and complexity of any condiment
That you can get this one is megga Chef it’s from Thailand the ties tend to add a little bit of sugar to their fish sauce which gives it a slightly more rounded flavor at least to me um this one’s real good this is a Vietnamese fish sauce from a great company called a
Redboat I don’t know if you can see on the label um it says 40 n uh the N number in fish sauce refers to the amount of protein in the sauce and that corresponds to the uh the sort of depth of flavor the intensity of the flavor of
The fish sauce they make a 40n and a 30n and they’re both really good and the final H kicker in this quartet of ingredients is chili crisp now this has become a very trendy ingredient in the last little while um the idea of combining fried chili sometimes fried uh
Onions and garlic and black beans um with oil it is an ancient practice but it became uh commercialized in I think in the ’90s by this company Lan ma first in China then it swept the world and now there’s all kinds of small makers of of chili crisp what you’re looking for of
Course is crunch you’re looking for heat and you’re looking for that beautiful uh oil that sort of holds it all together when you pour it on top of the dish that we’re about to show you this recipe is our Umami Rich napa cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and pork it’s an Asian
Riff on an Eastern European classic and it hits all the same Comfort notes as traditional cabbage rolls but it just has a lot more Umami depth thanks to some of our favorite Global Pantry products what one thing I love about this recipe is that it’s great for a
Dinner party because you can make it ahead and reheat it or you could kind of make it halfway through and then bake it shortly before your guests arrive now it starts with a cabbage and we have a big boy here from Melissa’s thank you this
Is a Napa cabbage and what I love about this is it’s much easier to pull these leaves off than with the traditional head of green cabbage if you’ve ever done that before you know what I’m talking about so I’ll just start we’re going to peel off the leaves and I want
To take a little bit of the stem end off because it’s it’s less pliable than the rest of it so just cut up a little bit of that off I’m just going to start pulling off leaves trimming them it’s okay if they’re a little bit torn up
Like that that that doesn’t matter once you roll the leaves together you won’t even see that I want to get a few extras we need 16 for the recipe but I’m going to pull off 18 in case some just don’t quite do right now I rinsed this cabbage so
There’s a little bit of water still clinging to it and that’s great it’s going to help the leaves steam we’re going to pile them here and then microwave them for a few minutes just to soften them I have all the leaves pil on the plate here and I’ve just kind of
Loosely covered them with plastic wrap you don’t have to wrap them tightly I mentioned before that I was working with a large head of Napa cabbage and that’s important because you’re going to have to pull off at least 18 leaves from it so you want to make sure you have a big
Enough head that you’ll get some good siiz leaves I’m going to microwave this on high for 5 minutes to soften the leaves to make the filling I have some ground pork and we got some nice fatty ground pork from the Asian market a lot of times the pork you get at the
Supermarket is really lean so if possible find a fattier um type of ground pork I also have some shredded carrot some sliced scallions and some cooked jasmine rice we cooked our own jasmine rice but as a shortcut if you want to use the pouch pre-cooked rice
That works fine I’m going to add to this some garlic that I’ve minced up some fish sauce here I have kosher salt and freshly ground white pepper now I want to spend a moment talk about the white pepper we like to Freshly grind Ours from the peppercorn
State if you have a mortar and petel you can do that very easily and quickly just takes a few little go rounds to get a nice mixture of ground white pepper you can go fair Fairly fine here now the white pepper is one of the things that
Couple with a fish sauce that gives this feeling the flavor of a spring roll which we love now I like to use my hands for mixing if you don’t like to do that you can certainly use a spatula you could wear gloves but I like to use my hands
Because I can mix things better more quickly more efficiently so all this just gets mixed together we’ve got that fish sauce that’s very fragrant and like I said the white pepper that also is aromatic and gives the this that wonderful flavor that we’re looking for the leaves softened up really nicely
In the microwave and now it’s time to stuff them so just going to place them here you want two leaves for each cabbage roll and you’re just going to kind of overlap them like this I have this filling here and what I like to do
Is I know that I’m going to have eight cabbage rolls total so I kind of like to make these little partitions in the filling to help me sort of more evenly distribute the F filling so I sort of cut it into quarters and then I cut each of those into halves and that
Tells shows me how to kind of evenly distribute The Filling so I’m going to put a little blob that’s the technical term of filling here in the center of these two cabbage leaves I’m going to roll this Leaf here over and then just continue to roll
There’s that seam going to kind of hold it in roll it all the way over so the seams on the bottom tuck the ends in a little bit and then this goes into a 13 by9 in baking dish that I have coated with cooking spray the sauce for these cabbage rolls is
Broth based instead of tomato based like you might be used to so I have some unsalted beef stock here I’m going to add to that one of our favorite Global Pantry ingredients this is oyster sauce it’s thick and glossy and full of savory flavor so that goes in and then the last
Ingredient to add more um mommy depth is some Korean toasted sesame oil it’s super nutty and fragrant just adds so much flavor and you don’t need a ton of it I’m just going to whisk this together and I’ll pour it over the rolls all that good flavor is going to
Meld together in the oven okay then I cover this with foil going to bake it at 375 for an hour cabbage rolls have cooked for an hour now so they’re going to be nice and hot perfectly cooked and the sauce is still pretty brothy it’s it’s always
Going to be brothy it’s not going to be a thick sauce but we still want to reduce it down a little bit and just concentrate the flavors a little more so I’m going to put it back in the oven for 15 minutes uncovered okay these guys are ready to
Plate up each serving is a generous two rolls unless you know you want to have a little less you could always go with one roll I’m going to make sure to get some of this luscious sauce so as I said before it’s it’s brothy but it has reded juice down a
Little bit so that the flavors are more concentrated now the Finishing Touch is optional but highly highly recommended it’s a spoonful of spicy chili crisp one of our favorite favorite finishing touches all right it’s time to cut in I’m going to transfer some of my yummy chili crisp over here the cabbage
Is super tender The Filling looks just just perfect I’ve had this so many times and I still love it I’m very excited to eat it Okay so good so a good friend uh of ours a cook and a chef named Keith Schroeder uh describe these Global Pantry ingredients as as the gift of time in a bottle and there’s no better example of that than Bono’s vinegar Bono’s vinegar I think
May be the best vineger in the world it comes from a small part of Southeastern France near the Spanish border it’s made from Red Wine from B’s wine um and it’s aged for five or six years and if you want to talk about a gift there you go
Because when you open one of these up and pour out just a little bit just a teaspoon I think in the upcoming recipe it just has this Wonder wonderful avocet of flavor it’s bone dry but it suggests sunbaked fruit uh and then there’s this ethereal really delicate cutting bit of
Acid that runs through the the vinegar as well so it’s just a delicious vinegar the other uh ingredient in this dish is uh pine nuts now pine nuts are pricey we all know that but if you buy them in larger quantities rather than tiny little jars they get less expensive and
They are a very high value nut in the sense that they have all this flavor packed into them that flavor is brought out especially by deep and careful toasting and that’s what we’ve done for this recipe for the sauce here what we wanted to do was really make the taste
Of pine nuts the star and then very delicately back it up with some of this vinegar and I think you’re going to find that it’s delicious when you try it so now I’ll show you how to make the recipe bro leaks with toasted pine nut sauce
This recipe is all about the sweet light onion flavor of leaks and we pair them with pine nuts which are just so delicious unique among all nuts and here we have ours that we’ve toasted already and we want to toast them slowly and properly so they’re not burned to prep
The leaks I’m going to pick this guy up and don’t worry if you have some little kind of wilty spots on them that’s fine we can pull that right off I’m going to trim off just the tiniest bit of the root end we don’t want to eat that but we
Want the leak to kind of hold together you’ll see in a minute what I mean by that and then I’m going to just cut off the dark green Parts I can keep some of these light green Parts uh you can either rinse these and stash them in your freezer for the next
Time you’re making stock or you can compost them then once I’ve got this trimmed I’m going to cut this in half lengthwise and this is what I meant by keeping that intact we want this to stay together if we cut all of that off this thing would just separate into its
Separate layers so I’m going to prep the rest of these leaks like this now leaks are notorious for harboring dirt between their layers like you can see this one here has some dirt in between so it’s very important to rinse well and get all up in there so
Just going to turn the water on and while the water’s running so separate those layers run my thumb through if they’re stubborn dirt and we’re going to do that with all of leaks here my system is going to be that turn them upside down when they’re washed the first stage in cooking the
Leaks is to blanch them and that just means to submerge them in boiling water for a few minutes to start softening them and parcook them so I have salted water here that’s boiling I’ll just add these guys in I want to make sure that the water returns to a boil after I add
Them just poke these down and so the water is sort of boiling I want to turn it down and simmer for just 3 minutes I just want them to be tender when I pierce them with a knife but definitely not mushy so I want to check the leaks to
Make sure we want them just tender when they’re pure with a knife oh yeah that’s good those are good so I’ll turn the water off now whenever you’re blanching you want to have a bowl of ice water nearby so that you can pull the vegetables when they’re at the perfect
Amount of dness and immediately stop the cooking if I just pull these out of water and like place them on the plate over here the residual heat would continue to cook them and they might get mushy we don’t want mushy okay and then when these while these cool off I’ll go make the
Sauce the sauce for the leaks just involves a few ingredients so we have those toasted P nuts here oops lightly toasted I don’t want a single one to get a waste and then a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil a little bit of salt our Global Pantry star here one of
Them is bol’s vinegar it is a delicious concentrated vinegar a little bit goes a long way so I’m just going to use a teaspoon it’s a half and one and then some garlic that I’m going to microplan first just to make sure that it all gets Incorporated I’m not
Going to throw a whole clove in there cuz you might get some chunks of raw garlic which some people like some people don’t when I’m doing garlic like this I don’t trim off that little dried up end because I use that uh as I’m grating so I don’t grate my fingers
So if you don’t have a microp you can just mince the garlic before it goes in and that will work too so then I gr down to that and then knock it in there a little bit of raw garlic goes a long way delicious close this up and so what I’m
Going to do is I’m going to pay until it’s sort of like a chunky peanut butter I don’t want it completely smooth I want a little bit of texture Here as you’re doing this you might have to stop and scrape down the bowl I do but it’s starting to come together as the nuts break down they’ll release oil and loosen the sauce done okay I think that looks good so here’s our sauce it is delicious
It is precious we want to scrape every last bit of this into the bowl we don’t want any to go to waste so if you wanted to make this recipe ahead you can make the sauce ahead and hold it you might have to thin it out before you serve the leaks but
Here we go lovely super Savory has that nice kind of mild but what would you say sweet a little bit earthy flavor from the pine nuts it’s going to pair beautifully with those leaks Broiler is preheated to high and I have a boiler safe dish that’s very
Important not all dishes are boiler safe and I’m just arranging the leaks in here in a single layer with the cut sides up and I don’t know why but I like to kind of Alternate which direction they go in whoopsie and then I’m going to brush them pretty generously with
Oil kind of letting it seep down into all those crevices this doesn’t take long to broil so most of the cooking has already happened when we blanched the leaks so we’re just looking to get them heated under the broiler and get a little color on them and a little
Char so now that those are done I’m just going to sprinkle them with a little bit of salt our blanching water was salted so so we don’t have to go overboard on the salt here plus our sauce has some salt in it and then a little bit of
Pepper okay and then these are headed to the broiler okay look how gorgeous these are they’ve gotten some nice Char and Browning on them that’s just going to add more flavor and then simply you could put these on a platter if you want but I like to just serve it from the the
Broiler dish like this if your sauce is sat for a little bit it might seize up and you can add some hot water to loosen it and I did just that and then the sauce is just going to go over those leaks it’s garlicky it’s got a little bit of brightness from the
Vinegar super nutty from the pine nuts I mean it’s basically like all like what 98% pine nuts this is good stuff so I’m going to do that and then I can serve some more sauce at the table for people who want more okay so I’m going
To Dish some up for myself and I like ones that have a good bit of char on them so I’m going to handpick those over Here and you know what else I’m going to do I’m going to top my serving with just a little bit more sauce cuz I like it that way oh boy can’t wait to dig in okay I’m going to dig in going to cut me a little bite grab some
Sauce let’s see how this is it just tastes fancy it’s so good
2 Comments
Love this cookbook! Always wanted a cookbook with a pantry that looks like mine. 🙂
My kinda pantry!!❤ 🌎