Cool Pete

So the infamous Heart of Targ did not stand alone; it came with a number of side dishes – to wit, Quadrotriticale Bread, Food Cubes, and Gagh (specifically Wistan Gagh, even). Two of these are quite basic, so I think we can safely cover them all in one post.

Quadrotriticale Bread

Earl had brought this one to my attention when I’d set him to do some research on the foods of Star Trek, since it is not only mentioned but actually forms the crux of an episode plot. The Enterprise is brought to a space station using an ultra-high priority signal – the equivalent of “Defcon 1″ indicating a state of possible war – only to discover a nervous trade attaché wanted them to protect a shipment of fancy grain called quadrotriticale. Not only that, but the dialogue actually references it being a derivative of the real world grain triticale, developed in Canada. Yes, the famous Mr. Spock actually had a line in which he got to say “Canada”.

SPOCK: Quadrotriticale is a high-yield grain, a four-lobed hybrid of wheat and rye. A perennial, also, I believe. Its root grain, triticale, can trace its ancestry all the way back to twentieth century Canada…

Anyway, at the end of the day it’s just wheat, and so suitable for making dinner rolls. As a lover of cheese, I decided to make them cheese buns.

Food Cubes

Star Trek was all about the primary colours, and particularly when it came to food. At this scene of a diplomatic reception about the ship, you can see coloured cubes of food. It was never clear what they were, but they were clearly futuristic… I guess. Anyway, this sort of nonsense is pretty iconic in the original series. I wasn’t even going to bother, but at some point during our correspondence Earl mentioned “I can’t wait to see what you’ll do for food cubes!” In the words of Barney Stinson, challenge accepted! So I had to figure out something that could be cubed, coloured, and would actually taste good. Since I have a good recipe for oven-roasted potatoes, I thought it could work with the application of food colouring (a vital ingredient more than once this night!).

I actually did make these, but they were taking a bit longer to cook than I’d anticipated, and by the time they came out dinner was over! And no one had the space to go back and stuff them in. So they sat looking picturesque on the dining room table for the rest of the evening. Happily, for those of us who stayed over (well, obviously me, I live here) they were waiting for us in the morning as a form of multicoloured hash brown – perfectly acceptable breakfast food! As it happens, yellow doesn’t work very well, despite being closest to a roasted potato’s natural colour. To get that vibrant, sports-car yellow that showed up on the TV show you kind of need to use chromium paint, which is highly toxic. But I think the blue and red turned out nicely. I’d probably up the concentration of food colouring even more next time, or work out a better technique for application to get an even spread, but I was happy enough with these results. Particularly since this dish could best be described as too little, too late. No, actually – too much, too late.

Klingon (Wistan) Gagh

Obviously gagh was mentioned in that episode I discussed earlier, in which Riker catalogues all the Klingon food he can get on the Enterprise (and later on the Klingon ship itself, still alive and wriggling). But it was also mentioned in a different episode, shown here in this part of the video menu:

In this episode of Deep Space Nine, Ezri Dax (left) is a “joined symbiont” – the humanoid Ezri has chosen to bond with a Trill symbiont named Dax, following the death of the previous host Jadzia – and so while her personality is much different, she still has the memories of her previous lives. The previous combined entity Jadzia Dax had ordered 51 crates of gagh to celebrate General Martok’s 51st birthday, each of a different variety. Now that her humanoid half is Ezri, she is made nauseous by the thought of all that gagh and has it destroyed. But first she gets to describe all the various types of gagh. This episode marks the first time we have any inkling that there are different types of gagh. Obviously just written for this joke scene. Still, the final type she describes, wistan gagh, is the one that’s packed targ’s blood. Which is what it’s being served with! So clearly whatever I made must have been wistan gagh.

This one was pretty easy – it’s supposed to be worms, so it was clearly going to be a pasta of some description. The Italian Centre here in town has an excellent variety of some truly odd-shaped pastas, including one thick corkscrew variety which would make an excellent “serpent worm”. All I needed was some food colouring to make it look purplish and a recipe for pasta that would work as a side for steak. (If I could have found some plastic agitators from a kid’s toy that would have made them appear to move, I totally would have done that! But I didn’t find one.)

Anyway, after some experimentation I decided on a very simple pasta dish, since anything more complex tended to be drowned out by the flavours of the steak main dish. This ended up being Spaghetti Aglio e Olio – spaghetti, garlic and oil. Very simple, very tasty, very easy. Which was handy.

This replaced a different recipe that also involved Parmesan cheese, and I had also planned to steam some bok choi to sit atop it, in a desperate attempt to add a vegetable to the mix. But that too fell to the side in my rush. I guess the asparagus soup would mark the last vegetable in this dinner. Regardless, I would make this as a side dish or even as a stand-alone pasta dish again, even without the need to meet certain arbitrary theme goals. So it was all good.

For this entry I even have a good bit of trivia for you! The reason that the Star Trek uniforms for different sections were bright yellow, blue, and red, and probably the reason that the foods were equally bright and primary, is simple – it was one of the first TV shows shot in colour. So they were trying to maximize the impact by colouring everything, rather than going subtle.

Also, in the original Star Trek, the colours (while somewhat inconsistent, particularly to start) eventually settled down so that yellow was command, blue was science/medical, and red was engineering (and security, sadly for those nameless red ensigns who died at the beginning of every show; maybe they wouldn’t have died if they’d been wearing something less visible at a distance). Upon the release of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the mid-eighties, the colours had changed so that Captain Picard and Commander Riker were in red. The reason for the change? They had already cast Patrick Stewart and Johnathan Frakes in those roles, and both actors looked terrible in the gold – they didn’t have the colouring for it. So they just changed all the uniforms.

And so while Star Trek is famously racially colour-blind, they are not so in the art department. And with that cheesy segue, here are some cheese buns.

Cheese Buns

(This recipe is designed for a stand mixer with a dough hook. If you don’t have one, find out how to make bread dough using the strong-arm method and then just substitute where appropriate.)

½ stick (¼ cup)   butter
½ cup   milk
3 tbsp   sugar
¾ cup   warm water (105°F to 115°F)
4 tsp   instant yeast
1 tsp   salt
3½-4½ cups   flour

1 stick (½ cup)   butter
½ cup   green onion, chopped
1-2 tsp   garlic, minced
2 cups   cheddar cheese (or Gruyere is also good)

1. Place milk, sugar, salt, and butter in small saucepan. Heat over low heat until butter melts and sugar dissolves. Set aside to cool to lukewarm.
2. Dissolve yeast in warm water in mixing bowl. If butter mix is still hot, add 3½ cups of flour first and then add butter mix. (Otherwise add butter mix first.) Turn mixer to Speed 2 for one minute.
3. Continue mixing for 2 minutes, adding additional flour ½ cup at a time, until dough clings to the hook and cleans sides of bowl.
4. Knead on Speed 2 for 2 minutes longer, or until dough is smooth and elastic. Should be slightly sticky to the touch.
5. Place dough in greased bowl, turning to grease top. Cover. Let rise in a warm place, free from draft, for an hour (or until doubled in bulk).
6. While dough is rising in bowl, immediately start melting the remaining butter in the existing saucepan. Sauté the garlic in the butter. Remove from heat and stir in the green onions, leaving to cool for the remainder of the hour.
7. Punch dough down into a small rectangle and place on floured surface. Roll out to a 12″×24″ thin rectangle.
8. Spread filling evenly onto the dough, leaving ½” around edges. Sprinkle half the cheese (1 cup) on top.
9. Roll lengthwise into a jelly roll. Cut the roll into 16 pieces (or however many holes your muffin tin has). Place pieces into lightly greased muffin tin. Cover with a towel and let rise for another hour.
10. Sprinkle with remaining cheese and bake at 350°F for 20-25 minutes.

Roasted Potatoes

These are basically the roasted potatoes from the Feast of Thrones pork roast, only sadly missing the pig fat part. Just dice the potatoes into cubes (if you care about that look) and then do the roasting exactly the same as described, only in their own dish rather than around the pork roast. I tried soaking the potatoes in water with food colouring, which was good for permeation but gave a very light, watery, pastel colouring. Better to mix it with a small amount of water and coat them after roasting.

Spaghetti Aglio e Olio

1 lb   spaghetti (uncooked weight)
6 cloves   garlic, thinly sliced
½ cup   olive oil
¼ tsp   red pepper flakes
¼ cup   chopped fresh Italian parsley
1 cup   finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (buy it pre-mixed and pre-grated)
1 tbsp   butter (optional)

1. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Cook spaghetti in the boiling water, stirring occasionally until cooked through but firm to the bite, about 12 minutes. Drain and transfer to a pasta bowl.
2. Combine garlic and olive oil in a cold skillet. Cook over medium heat to slowly toast garlic, about 10 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low when olive oil begins to bubble. Cook and stir until garlic is golden brown, about another 5 minutes. Remove from heat.
3. Stir red pepper flakes, black pepper, and salt into the pasta. Pour in olive oil and garlic, and sprinkle on Italian parsley and half of the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese; stir until combined.
4. Serve pasta topped with the remaining Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

It’s not traditional, but for extra richness you can add 1 tbsp butter when you toss with cheese.

Ah, the soup course! Easiest of all, as it happens. In the original Star Trek series, they only mentioned one alien food by name, and that was the Vulcan dish “plomeek soup”. Not even given a goofy space name, like Rigellian bloodworm soup, just an alien name of a vegetable. Also, that sort of gives one carte blanche. It could be anything. It ended up being asparagus.

In this shot of the menu you can see the soup splattered all over the left-hand wall, thrown by an enraged Mr. Spock, who was going through some personal issues in this episode. It starts with the angry soup-throwing, and ends with berserker rage and murder. It’s difficult to see clearly, but there was a close-up of the tray earlier, and it’s actually purple in colour. However it turns up in later series as just about any colour – green is certainly one of them – and all we can say for sure is that it’s a kind of vegetable, since Vulcans are vegetarian. There’s actually no cream in this recipe, and more stuff, but I was doing this one from memory. Still it captures the essence; it’s a simple simple recipe.

Anyway, I had this good recipe for asparagus soup kicking around and decided that would do the trick. It would also end up being pretty much the only green vegetable in the whole scenario, so probably good for our vitamin balance. In an eleven course meal it was important to just have a taster of the soup, because there was a lot of food on offer. Fortunately I’d already bought a set of tasting bowls for just such an occasion! As you can see in this scale shot, it’s not too much to handle.

One of the great advantages of this soup, from my point of view for this night, was that you could cook it the day before and then just reheat it when the time came. You are even supposed to use the same pot you were sautéing in, so it was one less dish used. Okay, there’s no pleasure in life but that one must purchase it with an equal moment of pain – I was running out of room in the fridge. But still, prêt-à-manger was clearly a big win for me!

I confess that it was a little disappointing for me; I had remembered trying it for the first time and thinking it was fabulous, but clearly that had reset my expectations and this time it didn’t live up to the promise for me. I mean, it was fine, but not as good as I remember. Fortunately no one else had tasted it before, and so all the guests thought it was great! It represented a trip down memory lane for Ellen, as this was one of the dishes we were taught to cook at an Intuit team-building day in Leduc. It also happened to be Ellen’s… third day at work? It happened on her first week. So not even there a full week and we took off for the day to drink and cook and eat. Not a bad place to be! Probably the first time she and I really met, also. So I have fond memories of eating, drinking, and meeting my future girlfriend, all while getting paid for it!

So, trivia… This episode is called “Amok Time”. We typically use the word amok (or amuk, or amuck) to mean hyperactive, as in “my kids were running amok at Chucky Cheese”. But the word is actually Malaysian, and it literally means “mad with uncontrollable rage”. People who run amok (mengamuk, “a furious and desperate charge”) typically grab a weapon (commonly a sword or dagger) and kill as many people as they can. It’s recognized as a true mental disorder in the DSM-IV TR, a culturally-dependent one. They theorize that in a culture where honour and physical prowess are still prized, and suicide is forbidden, that it represents an opportunity for dishonoured individuals to commit “suicide by cop” (or crowd) while regaining a small amount of respect as an individual to be feared and respected. At any rate, since the plot of this episode of Star Trek involves exactly this berserk killing rage, the title is far more accurate than most people suspect. Hardly surprising; this episode was penned by Theodore Sturgeon, one of the more thoughtful and erudite of the science fiction authors of the day.

There’s another science fiction connection here, a more modern one. While the term is in fact used by Indonesians, they actually have shifted towards using amuk to describe the behaviour of violent mobs. Their more recent term for the individual berserker rage is gelap mata (literally, “darkened eyes”), due to the fact that people in the sway of a true psychotic break tend to have massively dilated pupils, which makes them appear black. In the science fiction novel “Aristoi” by Walter Jon Williams, he supposes a future in which nanotechnology is prevalent. These are tiny molecular-sized machines which can assemble (or disassemble) anything at a molecular level. As early as the 1980s Eric Drexler suggested that this is a power with a terrible capacity to go wrong, since if these self-replicating machines lose track of their programmed limits on when they should stop disassembling matter and replicating themselves, they would represent an unstoppable plague which would digest all matter it encountered until the whole planet was remade. In Walter Jon’s universe, this is how the Earth was destroyed, from runaway nano from an Indonesian research lab. In his future, this runaway engine of destruction (nicknamed “grey goo” by Eric Drexler) is in fact called “mataglap nano”. A mad destructive rampage, characterized by a dark cloud of nanobots – gelap mata indeed! A good bit of business there, since he never deigns to explain any of this, and it’s left as an exercise for the reader to try and figure out his Indonesian neologism, and thanks to his modified word order and spelling it’s not as simple as Googling it.

Let us hope your mata are gelap only by hunger for this soup!

Asparagus Soup

(from “Simple, Fresh, Delicious” by Lovoni Walker)

1   leek, white and tender bits only, sliced
6   shallots, large, chopped
1 tbsp   oil
1 tbsp   butter
2 tbsp   flour
1 cup   dry white wine
2 cups   milk
2 cups   chicken broth (oops, guess it wasn’t really that vegetarian!)
2 lbs   asparagus, trimmed of woody ends, cut into 1″ lengths
salt and fresh ground pepper

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the leek and shallots and cook for about 10 minutes or until softened.
2. Add the butter and stir until melted. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, for one minute. Gradually stir in the wine, milk, and broth. Bring to a boil and add the asparagus and a pinch of salt and pepper. Cook uncovered for about 20 minutes or until the asparagus is softened.
3. Put the asparagus mixture in a blender in batches and blend until smooth and frothy. Return the mixture to the same pan.
4. Stir over medium heat until hot. Serve hot.

This soup is best made on the day of serving. Serves 4 to 6.

Upon re-reading this, I bet it would taste better if still frothy – but sacrifices had to be made in the name of expediency; it was adequate when refrigerated after Step 3 and heated the next day. And Saturday was already full of other food.

The next item on the menu was one I’d settled on as early as mid December. While I was down in San Francisco for work (technically Mountain View, but who can tell the difference who doesn’t actually live in the Bay area?) my colleague Miles and I went to a restaurant recommended by our boss, the overarching Director of our department. Alexander’s Steak House, as it happened. This turns out to be one of those restaurants where, when you buy a steak, that’s all you’ve bought – now you have to pay for a side of potatoes, and a side of vegetables, etc., etc. Very high end, very nice. (Very expensive! Our expense claim would have been a firing offence were it not for the fact that it was our department head who recommended it in the first place. Yikes!)

Well, one of the things they offered was Alexander’s Real Hamachi Shot. I think you can actually find it on their menu. Well, it was beyond delicious. Also very pretty in its presentation. So I ended up taking notes on my phone, and pictures of the dish, and pictures of the menu. When I got home I started researching what could have possibly gone into it. Eventually it would become this:

By the time I’d finished dissecting the appetizer and the menu, I was actually most of the way there. It just required fine-tuning the proportions. It’s a miraculous little dish in that, when done right, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – as much as I like every single thing that goes into it on its own, you couldn’t take away a single bit without lessening the effect. Synergistic, is what it is. And delightful! Also, it comes in tiny little glasses with tiny little forks for mixing them up before shooting them back all at once.

This is what led me to the Star Trek connection – tenuous, but any excuse to set these up! It was the shooting part. In the episode “Arena” (seen in the menu above), Kirk and the nameless Gorn are sent down to a planet by powerful beings who are intent on seeing them fight to the death (for reasons I won’t belabour here). It turns out the Gorn is slow but virtually indestructible, and Captain Kirk makes no headway at all in a physical battle. At any rate, in a nod to the science part of science fiction, quite suspiciously all of the ingredients for making gunpowder and a crude bamboo cannon to fire diamonds at the beast are all close at hand. So Kirk runs around collecting the various powders and chemicals to make a cannon. No doubt today it would lead someone to insist that this sort of televised violence is responsible for gun deaths in the United States. Instead of, say, actual guns. However in the 60s they just managed to make a chemistry lesson into an interesting part of an action TV show. So hats off to them for that; education for the win I say!

So my guests would be muddling together ingredients in a tiny glass like a culinary pipe bomb, just as Kirk did in that Star Trek episode. The keys to this dish are the truffled ponzu sauce, and also frizzled ginger. Oh, and also the daikon radish sprouts. That ended up as the piece of technology I brought to this particular dish – it calls for daikon radish sprouts, the kind that often top a piece of nigiri sushi. But even in the hippie health stores, it’s uncommon to find them sprouted for sale – they are not garden-variety (as it were) like alfalfa and bean sprouts. However you can buy the seeds, and also a handy little ventilated plastic container designed for sprouting them without letting them get moldy. Hydroponics, in other words. That’s the futuristic bit. Truthfully I’d hoped that there would be a magical zero-maintenance way of growing the sprouts, but in the end it comes down to soaking and then draining them twice a day. The well-ventilated container helps, but you could do it just as effectively with a bowl and a daily dose of paper towels if you were so inclined. Just takes more work and makes more of a mess. There’s no fire-and-forget sprouting where you open up the closet a week later and they’re ready. Sigh.

It also wants frizzled ginger – turns out this is just slivers of ginger deep-fried. Painstaking, but simple. And it was possible to find a recipe for truffled ponzu online, though I ended up changing the proportions to balance the taste. With truffle oil, a little goes a long ways as it turns out. Well, that’s mostly it; there were no amusing catastrophes in the creation of this dish. There was a small bit of confusion when I served them up, as some of my teetotalling guests thought they were liquor at first, but eventually everyone tried them and everyone was clamouring for more. Even those more timid folks who were really dubious about a mix of random elements centred around raw fish. I tell you, this one (fiddly though it is to make) is a real favourite of mine. So good! And as I said before, it also looks pretty.

Hm, Trek trivia: well, recently they’ve remastered the original Star Trek series, mostly replacing the special effects shots with newer computer generated models, and cleaned up the prints, but they’ve been pretty rigorous about leaving the live action stuff alone. However, in this particular episode, the Gorn (still looking like a big rubber suit with bulging silver bug eyes) in his opening close-up now has a brief blink. That’s all they added to him, but it is startling to see the first time you watch it, knowing that it was just a rubber suit at the time. Also, any real chemistry teacher would suggest that following Kirk’s actual method would never result in anything like an explosion or a cannon; technique, fine grinding, and exact proportions are what you want for half-decent gunpowder. Still, who needs gunpowder when you’ve got truffled ponzu?

Alexander’s “The Original” Hamachi Shot (gleefully stolen)

Hamachi (sushi-grade yellowtail)
Truffled ponzu sauce
- ¼ cup Ponzu sauce
- 1 tsp. truffle oil
- 1 minced truffle
Frizzled ginger
- 1 ginger root
- 1 cup vegetable oil
Thinly sliced jalapeño
Avocado cubes
Daikon radish sprouts

• Truffling ponzu sauce
  1. Buy ponzu sauce from an Asian grocer. It’s Japanese soy sauce with lemon or lime, and some other additives. I do have a recipe for making it from scratch, but I didn’t bother and it tasted just fine.
  2. Add 1 tsp. truffle oil and 1 tsp. chopped truffle for every ¼ cup of ponzu.
• Frizzling ginger
  1. Cut ginger root into thin slices (ideally using a mandolin), then cut into thin strips or shreds with a knife.
  2. Deep fry in a pot @ 360°F for 3-4 minutes, until brown and crispy, stirring frequently.

1. Add one “finger” of hamachi, about ½ cm × ½ cm × 2 cm, to glass.
2. Add two or three frizzled ginger strands.
3. Add one or two cubes of avocado, about ½ cm³, or the size of your baby fingernail.
4. Add one thin slice of jalapeño, cleaned of seeds.
5. Top with a pinch of daikon radish sprouts. Make sure to get two or three leafy heads.
6. Add two tsp. of truffled ponzu sauce, being sure to stir vigorously first. (The oil tends to separate.)
7. Serve.

Nothing to it, really, as long as you’ve gone to the trouble of frizzling the ginger, truffling the ponzu, and growing the sprouts ahead of time. And you have to have hors d’œuvre glasses for serving it in (though I bet 2-oz shot glasses would work). Simple, yeah. Go to it!

Well now that we’re all conversant with the theme of the dinner, and the menu, let’s get down to brass tacks. But wait – the hallmark of science fiction (well, bad science fiction) is that one must mangle common idioms. Star Trek was in many ways groundbreaking, but at the end of the day it committed many of the sins of bad science fiction. For instance, no noun survives unadorned with either some alien planet name, or a techno-sounding suffix, or worse yet the epithet “space” – you know, to let you know that this is the future somehow. Alternatively is the use of the phrase “your Earth…”, as in “10 of your Earth minutes”, to let you in on the amazing secret that the speaker is not from Earth, as if you hadn’t guess by the profusion of tinfoil on the set and goofy costumes. So let us instead get down to Denebian brassium space tacks, and waste no more of your Earth seconds.

This was one of the last dishes I conceived of, despite its placement on the menu – at this point I had a lot of the main dishes fleshed out, but nothing in particular for appetizers. I did have the “Gorn Meat Gunpowder Shot” in mind, but that’s an amuse-bouche, really; not much to it. So I wanted something I could hand to people as they came in. But I had nothing in mind, and no Star Trek theme to hang it on anyway. Then my friend Paul, in a fit of genius while I was describing the dinner preparations to him, said “let me think… you need to have a Smorgasborg”. Brilliant! The best pun of the night. Of course, I wasn’t about to have an actual smorgasbord, since that’s kind of an entire meal idea. So instead I just dwelled on the Borg aspect.

For those of you not in the know, the Borg were big bad alien menaces to threaten the Federation in Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were half organic and half machine, or cyborg, hence their name. They had a communal hive mind thing going on, like a self-organizing machine, and so cared nothing at all for art or culture. To reflect their practical natures, their spaceships were simple giant cubes made of a partially open structure – the simplest form to build. So a cube was clearly in the works.

Eventually I decided on an excellent recipe I picked up from Tidings magazine, for miso risotto and duck breast. I did a quick test on the risotto and realized it was easy to form into cubes, if you had a form, like making a sand castle with a bucket. Only ours would be a rice cube. Then I could offer up pickles and olives as the self-serve portion, thus slightly justifying the “smorgas” part of the name. Success! The course was born. Here’s a still from the menu:

(The “Wolf 359″ reference is for the star system where the big battle took place in the show, which is where I took my footage from. A special effects extravaganza.)

I felt like I needed something for the serving, to “Trek” it up a little, and happily a little online store called ThinkGeek served me well – you can buy a little science toy which is essentially one of those Van Der Graaf spark balls, flattened into a disc, where green sparks arc in a futuristic way. It turns out these had been used in the actual show (well, a larger version) as the Borg’s recharging stations in their ships. So I threw that down behind the pickles and olives to make the presentation super-geeky (as if it wasn’t already, yes, I know).
You can find an animated clip of this on my friend Steve’s blog post about the dinner.

Now to make it “Modernist”, or at least technical, I did up the risotto using a pressure cooker. But that’s merely an option; this dish works just fine making the risotto in the traditional way. But let me tell you, if you do own a pressure cooker, then it is the only way to make risotto! So easy, so excellent. For those of you who are still risotto virgins in the kitchen, here’s the science of risotto, from Modernist Cuisine At Home.

Starch, released by short-grain rice during cooking, is what thickens dishes like paella and risotto. Natural starches are composed of two types of polymers, amylose (which is better at gelling) and amylopectin (which thickens by binding up water). Plants contain differing ratios of each, which is why short-grain rice works best for these dishes, but long-grain rice doesn’t.

Inside a plant cell, starch is typically stored inside granules, which have a layered structure like an onion. During cooking, the starch granules absorb water, swell, and become sticky. But the rice doesn’t thicken until the cells burst open and release the sticky granules.

That is why we stir the rice as it cooks: to break open the cells and release the starch into the cooking liquid, thereby thickening it. Continued gentle stirring then prevents lumps from forming. To see the gelling power of starch in action, allow a risotto to cool – it gels into a solid mass.

There is no need to stir rice when you cook it in a pressure cooker because the process forces so much water into the starch granules and plant cells that many more of the cells burst on their own.

There’s only one thing better than risotto, and that’s risotto that you don’t have to stir! I’m a total convert to the pressure cooker now, at least for the right applications. Risotto and paella definitely fall into that category.

Of course, nothing goes entirely smoothly. The first time I cooked this dish I didn’t have a pressure cooker, so I was doing it the traditional way, but that wasn’t a problem. However, the duck… ah, the duck. So the recipe calls for searing the duck skin on a frying pan in a hot hot oven (450°F) and simultaneously roasting the meat in the oven. I tried this in the Big Green Egg at the same time, going for a compare-and-contrast thing. Now, the BGE always does a fabulous job, and it does impart a delightful smoky flavour, but our taste test (Ellen as always serving as a willing volunteer for testing!) showed that when done on the Egg, you couldn’t really tell it was duck. It tasted just like chicken. Good, smoky, but that stripped away the subtle differences between duck and other birds. So the oven was the way to go for this one, or you might as well just use chicken breasts.

So you may know that duck is a very fatty meat, and so preparing it (in my experience) generally leads to something that is either quite fabulous or just plain awful – there has never been a middle ground in my life on that one. Total success or abject failure. Because of the fat. Now my first attempt led to total success on the flavour front; it was an easy choice. But on the cooking front? I mentioned that duck was a fatty meat, right? My oven was a disaster exceeding the scope and breadth of the Yorkshire pudding meltdown from the Feast of Thrones. I might as well have filled up a water balloon full of fat and put it in the oven until it exploded, except that would have actually been more work. The oven had a pool of fat at the bottom of it, and a thick coating on every single surface up to and including the roof of it. That pool? You could actually see ripples in it when I opened the door to extract the duck from what was now some kind of smoker, or fat-powered kiln. That weekend was a self-cleaning weekend, and I’m not convinced my oven doesn’t need another go-round at the full 5 hour cycle to finish the job.

This led to the purchase of a splatter shield – a simple bit of mesh, like a strainer, only flat – which goes over said dish. Cost me something like $2.89 at Ikea, just because I happened to be there with friends and spotted one; I’m sure they are readily available everywhere. Compared to my hourly rate at work multiplied by the hours of oven pre-cleaning and oven babysitting, a savings of Brobdingnagian proportion. If I never need it again, it was still totally worth it! On the actual day of Geekquinox, the oven survived unscathed and it had no effect on the cooking of the meat, exactly as it’s supposed to work. Dunno if that counted as either Modernist or particularly technological, but I was happy with that bit of gadgetry, let me tell you!

To finish off I shall attempt to always give a bit of Star Trek trivia before the actual recipe. In this case, the big battle against the Borg marked a two-part cliffhanger across seasons, and it led to two things: the first was that in the aftermath, in which the captain had been “assimilated” by the Borg (implanted with cybernetics and forced to battle his own people before being rescued), the writers of the show allowed actual consequences to sneak in. He didn’t just sail off into the next episode unaffected; they allowed it to colour his behaviour for the next year. Which marked a milestone in the franchise, of longer story arcs and consequences, which to my mind made it much better fiction. The other amusing bit turns out to be that when asked for a nail-biting cliffhanger, the Executive Producer had already made the decision to leave the show and let someone else have a turn in the big chair, and so he crafted a cliffhanger in which Captain Picard was stolen and assimilated, the Borg were invading our space, and nothing was capable of stopping them. And he had no idea whatsoever how it could be resolved. It was a bit of a practical joke on whoever came after him; he said himself he felt it was unresolvable. Then Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, managed to talk him into staying for one more season. So he was hoist by his own petard, painted into an insoluble corner by… himself! Heh. That amuses me.

So here is the recipe, both as it appeared in the magazine and the modified pressure cooker version I actually made. During the actual dinner this ended up being the second course served, but I really intended for it to happen sooner. Oh well! The wine was flowing, and so all was forgiven.

“Four Whistle Farm” Duck Breast with Wild Mushroom Risotto and Miso Broth

(From Tidings Magazine, profile of Brayden Kozak of the Three Boars restaurant)

3 tbsp   light miso paste (shiro miso, called “white miso” even though it’s not white)
4 cups   hot chicken or vegetable broth
3 tbsp   extra virgin olive oil
1   shallot, finely diced
1   garlic clove, minced
1 cup   mixed wild mushrooms, cleaned and sliced (or minced)
1.5 cups   Arborio rice
½ cup   Shaoxing wine (or sherry)
2 tbsp   malt vinegar
2   duck breasts, cleaned and skin scored
2 tbsp   butter

1. Dissolve the miso paste in the hot broth and set aside.
2. Heat the oil in a large non-stick skillet, and sweat the shallot and garlic until softened. Add the mushrooms and cook until softened. Add the rice and toast until white and opaque. (This instruction always puzzled me, since Arborio rice comes out of the box white and opaque. I just toast it for a while, until I feel good about it.) Add the wine and the vinegar, cooking until absorbed.
3. Add enough broth-miso mixture to just cover the rice (about two ladles-full) and stir until absorbed. Repeat until the rice is cooked through and creamy. Reserve a small amount of broth to finish the plate.
4. Meanwhile, heat a cast iron pan in an oven you are preheating to 450°F. Season the duck breasts with salt and pepper. Remove the pan from the oven (using gloves, obviously!) and place the duck breasts skin down into the pan. Roast until the fat has rendered, the duck becomes crispy, and the meat is medium rare. Set aside to rest.
   Important note!: unless you love oven cleaning, you will want to put a screen over your cast-iron frying pan at this point to contain the inevitable splatter.
5. Finish the risotto with the butter and adjust the seasoning to taste. Place the risotto in a shallow bowl and top with thin slices of duck breast. Pour a small amount of broth around the risotto and garnish with leaves of baby basil and Maldon sea salt.

Pressure cooker variant:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 450°F, with your frying pan inside. (Obviously you need a frying pan that doesn’t have a wooden handle for this.) You can start the duck here, i.e. copy of Step 4 from above:
   Season the duck breasts with salt and pepper. Remove the pan from the oven (using gloves, obviously!) and place the duck breasts skin down into the pan. Roast until the fat has rendered, the duck becomes crispy, and the meat is medium rare. Set aside to rest.
   
2. (Just as above) heat the oil in the bottom of your pressure cooker, and sweat the shallot and garlic until softened. Add the mushrooms and cook until softened. Add the rice and toast until you feel like it’s done some good (see above for why). Add the wine and the vinegar, cooking until absorbed.
3. Add the broth, and the miso. Seal and cook for 7 minutes at pressure (start timing when the little stick pops up to say it’s at full pressure). Release the pressure and open. It’s possible you will need to either add a touch of water or to reduce it a bit more, just to fine-tune the process. But often it’s ready to go at this point.
4. Form the risotto into a Borg-like cube on the plate, and add a slice of duck to the side.