Bringing The Restaurant Home #1

[Correct Dining by Wilfrid: May 4, 2009]

So here's something you can do as an alternative to spending ninety bucks and up for dinner for two.  Because the truth is, if the entrée is twenty dollars, and you order a three course meal, pay tax and tip, that's the price bracket you're in right away.

And let me be honest, I need to balance my own budget after ten days in Paris.  This is the first in a series of six attempts to create an acceptably enjoyable three or four course meal at home in New York City.

The guidelines are:  a budget of up to fifty dollars for two people, no exceptionally challenging cooking techniques or unusually fancy equipment, and also not too much time in the kitchen.  And because I find it important in terms of time-saving, the closest I can come to one-stop shopping.  I mean, if you have nothing else to do, you can create an amazing meal with a whole day (and a Metrocard) visiting vendors from Arthur Avenue to Chinatown.  These meals require some effort, but none will be marathons.

This week's stop, Essex Street Market - and all the information is at that site, follow the links to the vendors' own web-spaces.  "A historic culinary destination on NYC's Lower East Side," as it says, although the truth is that it has been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty first century by some excellent new market-holders who insisted on extending the opening hours and - farsightedly - establishing it as a destination for serious food shoppers rather than just an early-closing inexpensive grocery for the local community.  The beauty is that it remains the latter too, with great value vegetable and fruit stands, endless aisles of jars and cans, and a lot of specialty Latino, especially Mexican, ingredients.  Come here for cactus, tomatillos and annatto paste.  And stacks of tortillas so cheap they're almost free.

My best way to shop within a budget is to start by picking the main ingredients of the main dishes.  This time, as so often, that means fish and meat.  Unless you are speculating on dry-aged steak, a whole lobe of foie, or a rib roast, it's the supplementary courses which pile on the cost.

New Star fish market has yet to sell me anything disappointing, and I picked up butterflied red snapper - $6.99 per pound, which comes to about $1.50 for a gutted fish.

Advertised as filets, they aren't really that.  You need to strip the main bone out with a sharp knife.  Then they're ready to go.

The New York restaurant dish of the last three years has been pork belly.  Can you make pork belly at home?  Easiest thing in the world; and without being unduly cynical, the reason the city's chefs have embraced this cut is not just an enchantment with pork fat, but the fact you can buy a heavy piece like this...

...for three dollars and forty one cents.  And that's retail.  Chefs paying wholesale are having a lot of fun turning this into a fifteen dollar entrée, because I know I am going to get four full portions out of that.  It's from Jeffrey's butcher stand, by the way, although I also recommend Luis for inexpensive cuts.

Formaggio Essex didn't have quite the cold cuts selection I recall from previous visits, but I did find samples from first-rate Californian salume producers in the fridge at the rear.  I picked up Fra' Mani's Nostrano, coarse-ground and mellow salami, and some sweet coppa produced from Molinari & Sons.  A nice pairing: Fra' Mani was founded in 2006, Molinari some hundred and ten years earlier; either way, the salume coming out of San Francisco strikes me as easily comparable with Italian imports.  (Shoot me, we'll visit Di Palo in Little Italy later in this series, and see what they have to say). 

Formaggio offers European cheeses too, but I was already set on buying local cheese from Anne Saxelby.  I spent fourteen dollars on the two meats, but they'll last beyond this one dinner.  As New York cheese-fanciers know, Anne is quite special.  A Murray's alumnus (you can still see one of her paintings - of cheese - hanging in Murray's seminar room), she has established her tiny market stall as the prime source of domestic "artisanal" cheeses, and it's easy to recognize an increasing number of restaurant cheese-plates around town as being Saxelby-sourced. 

As I arrived, she was trying to stuff more cheeses into the packed cold cupboard.  Too much cheese, apparently.  A bit like The Strand and books.  My strategy here is to look for cheeses I haven't tried before, and I tasted and bought some new creations.  Battenkill Blue has the musty, wrinkled crust of a Stilton, but Three Corner Hill Farm on the border of Vermont and New York has been making it for less than a year.  It's sweeter than Stilton, with a mild, pale, fruity paste.  Willoughby, from Ploughgate Creamery in Vermont, is another newcomer, a soft cheese with a Vacherin-like minerality, its pale orange rind washed with local mead.  I added half a wheel of Olga, a very firm cow/goat milk cheese from Maine.

Having spent something like seven bucks on fish and meat, I did go crazy on the cheese.  Twenty dollars and change, but it's cheese for the week.  I added a jar of Goya sweet pepper salad to the basket.  If I'd been cooking the same day, I'd have picked up baguettes from Formaggio or Saxebly too.

No recipes here, just some ideas.  And yes, you do need a sharp knife.  Pork belly, as I said, is the easiest thing in the world, but it does pay to trim off the tougher skin.  We'll use that later.

I season it and marinate for a few hours in alcohol.  Red wine is fine, but I recommend a good splash of vermouth, with gives it a herbal sweetness. 

Shake it around occasionally to make sure it's red all over.  With the pork belly, I just wanted a simple starch.  Mashed potatoes would work, grits/polenta, rice.  It was convenient to pick up a yam, which I boiled and mashed with milk and butter.  Candied yams are fine, but the natural sweetness is enough for me.

If we are bringing the restaurant home, we need to set a table.  It's up to you; if paper napkins are easy, why not?  But have something like a place setting.  I am not in favor of eating a series of courses in front of the television.

The pork belly, sliced into nice portions, went into a low oven (225F), with the marinade and tightly covered, for a couple of hours.  Half an hour before table time, I took out the pork and  plated the salami and coppa in a neat mosaic, centered around a little crock of olive oil in which I'd steeped some dry rosemary.

That's the first course, with a fresh baguette, cut into rounds.  Serving this, I put the snapper filets into a pan, seasoned skin side down.  By the time snacking on the cold cuts has finished, you can flip the fish and take it off the fire - the heat of the pan will finish the underside.

I confess I had ambitions for a fancy salsa at this point, but I never got around to it.  I just wanted something cool and crunchy with the fish, so I diced the Goya peppers and tossed them with corn kernels.

With the pork belly out of the oven, I fired it up to 450F and put the sliced and very well salted strips of skin in a tough pan to render.  They cook quick, shedding a lot of fat.  After twenty minutes, drain the fat off (be careful) and put them back in the oven for another few minutes.  Crackling or chicharrones, and be careful with your teeth.

The pork belly gets finished in a dry pan, just easily crisped up on each side when you're ready to eat it.  It does shrink down while braising, but this is two of four portions I got from that original fat hunk.

My plating style tends to be austere, but here's the finished boot-filler.  A slab of tender, winey belly, a scoop of smashed-up yam, and a couple of crunchy bits of skin.

I pulled a 1990 Chinon out of the wine-fridge, Olga Raffault's "Les Picasses," already turning a brickish color with age, the flint and minerals of the soil getting musky under the fruit.  This wine was happy with the cheese.

The Olga was a little too firm for my taste, but I thought the Willoughby and the Battenkill Blue showed just how domestic cheese-making has come in the last few years.  These would not embarrass a good cheese-plate in France or Spain - and quite seriously, there were few American cheeses of which that could be said, even seven or eight years ago.

Counting the cost

Way under budget with this dinner.  As I said, barely six or seven dollars for the pork and snapper together (and I have pork left over).  Fourteen dollars on cold cuts, but it took only half what I bought to fill the plate.  Say eight dollars.  I have cheese for the week: ten dollars would have been plenty for this meal.  With the vegetables and bread, a little over thirty dollars then.  Fifteen or sixteen dollars a head for four courses.  It's not difficult.

The meal can be reproduced, in structure at least, with a visit to a Whole Foods or a similar "gourmet" market, but I strongly recommend looking in local, less fancy supermarkets or neighborhood butchers for cuts like pork belly.  If you can't find it, it's because the top chefs have bought it all.  Or more seriously, substitute pork ribs. 

Over the next five weeks, more shopping stops around town, and different types of meals.  I may even make dessert at some point if you're lucky.