Tenderloin in Red Wine and Peppercorn Sauce

This dish is the result of an accident, and an inability to keep my wine stores properly stocked... a very happy accident indeed.

I set out one monday evening after a delightful and unusually enterprising meeting with a close friend of mine to make steak in peppercorn sauce (steak au poivre), a recipe I got out of a cruise ship cook book of all places, and one which my family has come to adore. As with all endeavors based solely on good intentions and plans made with half a brain late one evening, I found myself missing crucial ingredients, as well as with a fridge stocked with prepped veggies for dinners long since past. A single bottle of wine, red wine, the wrong wine, stared plainly at me from the back of my cupboard, laughing mercilessly at the contortionist act one has to endure to simply peer into the depths of the aforementioned cupboard, let alone reaching blindly back only to knock the bottle over. 

I counted my ingredients:

tenderloin medallions, cut 1 1/4 inch thick

1/3 cup red wine

2 tbs green peppercorns in brine

one half white onion diced

6 or 7 quartered button mushrooms

1 cup to 1 1/4 cup beef stock

1 tbs sugar (optional)

and the ingredients to make a roux, 1 tbs each flour and oil

This should work, I said now with a sore back. Why shouldn't it work? Well, I'll spoil the ending for you now, it did work!

I started with the sauce, having decided to grill the tenderloin instead of pan sear, I would not be developing any delicious fond in the pan to boil into the sauce, and knowing that I could keep the sauce hot while I waited for the tenderloins to be cooked to perfection all at once on the grill. 

-Discard the brine from the peppercorns, and rinse with water. Crush the peppercorns lightly with a mortar and pestle, or with the back of a pan.. or something large and flat and otherwise capable of smooshing brined peppercorns, and leave to soak in the red wine

-Saute button mushrooms in a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of vegetable oil until the edges start to brown.

-Add the onions and continue cooking until the mushrooms are caramelized and the onions become translucent and only very slightly browned

-Add the flour and the oil for the roux and cook, stirring for a minute until the flour forms a paste and clings to the mushrooms

-Add the green peppercorns and red wine mixture. stir until a slightly thinner paste is formed from with the roux

-Add the beef stock slowly, mixing constantly in order to produce a smooth sauce

Allow to simmer happily on the stove on a low heat until the onions are soft

after a few minutes have passed of simmering, taste the sauce. I added a small amount of sugar at this point which helped to balance out the sharpness of the red wine, and the salty heat from the peppercorns.

Grill the tenderloin medallions until done to your liking, and allow to rest before smothering in a blushing deep burgundy sauce which you have fortunately prepared in advance, you smart rascal, you. 

A word on tenderloins and peppercorns, from which this recipe is named... but not about red wine, as my lower back holds a grudge.

Tenderloins: a delightfully tender meat with little fat, little connective tissues, and not well known for its flavor. This loin sits against the ribs of the cow, and as such some fat can be found towards the larger side of the cut. Use the same principals when buying tenderloin as when buying any other choice cut meats. Fat marbling will be your biggest clue, as it seems most tenderloins come shrink wrapped and wet aged at local wholesalers.

Cooking tenderloin can be a little bit tricky, depending on the methods you use to test doneness. poking at the meat with your finger will likely give false results of doneness, as tenderloin is generally much more tender than other cuts of meat, go figure. Chances are while you were flipping the medallions on the grill, the meat fibers will start to separate naturally to give you a glimpse of the doneness inside. If you must, you have my permission to make a small cut into one of the medallions, as the juices lost from a small cut will be nothing compared to a grill full of overcooked and rather expensive meat, and the knowledge of tenderloin doneness is a valuable tool. 

Brined green peppercorns used to come in a can which held softer and slightly less potent peppers, and were easier to work with. However now it seems that I can only find the bottled version, which are rather unpleasant to bite into without first crushing the peppercorns, and then allowing them a short soak in red wine to take away some of their bite. These are the same green peppercorns you find in spice mills, only instead of desiccating them, they are soaked in a brine like capers... but they are peppercorns, not capers.

Peppercorns prepared in this way are a magical culinary device. They are very bold, but they fit into many recipes where a strong pepper flavor is desired. I highly recommend experimenting with these on your relatives and others who will give you honest feedback. 

French Onion Soup

There are some dishes which are so simple and delicious, they cry out not to be mucked with. And when those dishes cross my family, their pleas go unheard. One such dish which my family has been tweaking for a lifetime is french onion soup. 

I remember the first time I tried my mom's french onion soup. I also remember the only way they got me to try it was by telling me that booze was third on the list of ingredients. Finally I remember not liking it at all, however, as its a favorite of my parents, it was a dish soon to grow on me (metaphorically, of course). Now my mother and i have made french onion soup so many times that we almost dont need the recipe to remember its four ingredients. 

Not meaning to get all mushy here, but french onion soup is the quintessential dish from all my previous experience in the kitchen. Few ingredients, lots of time and attention, and a house full of the aroma of slow cooking foods. Nothing makes me happier (nothing of course, except for september 16 when Starwars the Force Unleashed comes out!). This is one of those time tested and true recipes which has little creative process involved in its creation, but a great deal of thought into the technique, quality of ingredients, and small alterations to the whole process. Essentially it is a dish which holds the memories of decades of tweaking and my own families traditions and rituals surrounding french onion soup nights.

Of course with a dish like this, I cant simply give the recipe and let you have at it, so I will endeavor to educate you on the entire ritual. The first step, before you haul out your brand new Global only onion chopping knife, and your bushel of onions, go around the house and close off all bedroom doors. This dish will stink up your house like a snake in a mongoose factory... which is great, until you have gorged yourself on soup and you cant bare the thought of it anymore. Then, get out your Global only onion chopping knife and bushel of onions. 

A note on chopping onions: especially for men, you will want to have the phone handy for when you start chopping. Onions make you cry like a blubbering boobkin, use it to your advantage and call up your mother inlaw in a sobbing heap in order to guilt her into not visiting on the weekend, or call up your spouse and show her your sensitive side. The onions can wait, its called milking it.

A  further note on french onion soup etiquette: if you eat french onion soup alone, then you sleep alone too.

Finally, french onion soup freezes remarkably well. There is little fat to absorb freezer flavors, and with that many onions, you dont need to worry about any overpowering aromas seeping into your soup.

The recipe to serve 4 soup lovers, or 8 appetizers:

4 large yellow (sweet/ vidalia) onions

4 cups good beef stock (low sodium)

3 tbs good brandy

2 tbs sugar

Peel and slice the onions down through their core, then cut into half rings. Separate the onion rings by hand. Pour two tablespoons of vegetable oil into a stock pot large tall enough to have at least three or four inches of height over top of the onions, otherwise stirring will become an issue, and place over medium heat. At first you will only need to stir occasionally, every minute or so, but as the onions cook down you will need to stir more frequently. Browning in the early stages is bad, as it leads to bitter flavors, so concentrate on sweating the onions very slowly. It will take about an hour of stirring in which time you must not leave the kitchen. The sugars which stick to the pan burn very quickly, and so will need to be scraped often. About 45 minutes in, add the sugar, as the onions are finally about ready to start taking on some color.

I have thought about cooking the onions in the oven, but I have not yet experimented with this. The more gentle indirect heat from the oven would probably protect from burning, and perhaps allow the juices from the onions to evaporate faster. Something to look into in the future. 

After your hour of stirring and scraping the pan, your onions should have reduced down to less than one fifth of their original volume, and have formed a small tan colored mass in the pan. Add the brandy and scrape any remaining sugars off of the bottom of the pan. Add three cups of the beef stock and taste. If its too salty, add water. If its not beefy enough, add more stock. The first thing you should taste should be sweet, onion sweet. Afterwards a crisp saltiness which harkens to the delicious earthy stock your are using. It isn't a very complex flavor, and it does well with a great deal of variations with regards to the balance between the sweet and salty. So go with what you like. 

Put the lid on, and put it on the lowest heat on your stove, and forget about it for at least three hours. You may need to add more liquids after the simmering is done, but taste first. 

Traditionally you would place a crouton of sour dough on top, and top that with some stringy white cheese before broiling it to crisp up. I recommend this whole heartedly. 

Pizza wrap-up: finally a dough which doesn't suck

Ok guys, lets talk dough, pizza dough.

Over the years I have learned a few things about food, and even fewer things about baking, but one lesson which keeps cropping up is that simple ingredients, and well thought out processes produce some of the most mind-blowing dishes. Pizza is simple, or at least it should be, and is therefore subject to this rule.

By all means, make your pizzas as complex as you are capable of. Ingredients piled inches thick, sauces which take days to simmer, meats spaced just so as to be perfectly symmetrical. Do all that, as it is the american way with pizza, but do it knowing that your missing something truly magical. 

I had an epiphany with pizza several months back, and have been working on the process to get it just to my liking. Pizza making should be simple. Few high quality toppings, prepared in an instant and thrown into a blisteringly hot oven. But few dishes are quite that simple. No, if you want to make the best home made pizza you have ever tasted (and have it stand up as a reasonable facsimile to those fond memories of your last visit to naples), then realize that it is the dough which requires the complexity and the time consuming processes. 

Think of the Japanese and real Italian philosophy for noodles for a moment. There are, of course, toppings and sauces and the like, but every aspect of a noodle dish from either of these cultures is designed to showcase the noodle. Entirely backwards from the North-American standard of whatever noodles highlighting a bottle of sauce, I know. 

Now lets think about pizza, as that is the topic of this article. Any pizza dough will not do. The dough has to be able to be stretched by hand, which produces a crust that is at once light, crisp, and with just enough bite (forget the rolling pin). It has to have flavor, which comes from long rises which allow yeast to do its yeasty thing. Finally, pizza dough has to crisp up quickly, otherwise your pizza will fall apart, and the crust will get soggy. 

The recipe I use is taken directly from Alton Brown's Good Eats (season 3, episode 9 - Flat is Beautiful)

Ooh look, some clever web designer put the recipe online, how handy.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pizza-pizzas-recipe4/index.html

For those of you who watch tv, I would hope that you saw Heston Blumenthal's show, In Search of Perfection, where he cooks his perfect pizza. Heston goes out of his way to make the pizza simply complex, thats what Heston does, but in the process he came to the same road block any aspiring pizza chef will come to, the heat! The best pizzas are cooked in a wood fired brick oven, and the best wood fired brick ovens can reach temperatures of 900 degrees!  You could scour the internet for brick oven plans (or, I could just save you the trouble and direct you here: http://www.fornobravo.com/pompeii_oven/table_of_contents.html ), or you can come to the same conclusion that I had been mulling over, and which Heston recommends, which is to forgo the pizza stone, and cook on cast iron. 

Cast iron stores a great deal of heat, heats quickly, and transfers heat to foods better than stone, and as such it is the preferred cooking surface for pizzas. Heston cooks on an upturned enameled frying pan, which leads to tiny pizzas. I cook on an upturned rectangular griddle. My pizzas are bigger than Hestons. Who would you trust?

Set your oven to full broil with your cast iron surface in place and close the door. It needs to be as hot as possible in there, your oven can handle its self clean cycle, it can handle having the door closed on broil. Then start stretching out your pizza dough. The oven and the cast iron will take time to heat up fully, and by the time your first pizza is ready, so to should be the oven. 

Making sure your pizza can still slide on the peel, send your first pizza into the inferno quickly, and close the door behind it. I place the cast iron cooking surface about 6 inches away from the broiler element in my oven. When the pizzas top is browned, the crust has some blackened marks to it around the edges, and the bottom of the crust sounds crispy when tapped on, your pizza is done. You will, however, have to experiment with how far from the broiler element your cooking surface has to be in order to ensure that your crust and toppings reach perfection at the same time, as ovens apparently vary. 

Finally, adorn the top of your pizza with a sprinkling of parmesan, cured ham, fresh basil, and a grind or two of good salt, and allow your pizza to rest for a minute or so on a cooling rack before you cut into it and eat. 

the most epic quest for the perfect pizza

Anyone who knows me will have heard of my desire to create the perfect pizza (probably more times than they would have liked to). Its one of my biggest current goals in life, and I think I'm getting close!

Everybody's idea of the perfect pizza is different. Some like it thick, where as some like it thin... yadda yadda. If you're reading an article arrogant enough to claim the search for the perfect pizza, you've heard all this before. So instead of a full page of me telling you about the differences of one pizza from another (and therefore saving me from the research for the time being), I'll just tell you what MY perfect pizza would look like.

Starting from the bottom.. the very bottom: no corn meal! I was once guilty of using corn meal on my pizza, but that was at a time when I didn't put in the effort to preheat my pizza stone properly, and when I cooked inside in an oven that wouldn't get hot enough to burn cornmeal. Thats right, cornmeal burns, but aside from that its hard and it sticks in your teeth. Save the stuff for polenta and cornbread. I use regular all purpose flour, or whatever flour I happen to be using when working with the dough. The flour doesn't seem to burn until your pizza is burned with it, and your pizza slides off just as easy. And hey, you wont be picking cornmeal out of your molars for an hour, which is a convenient way to remind yourself of that delicious pizza you just had, but not all together attractive when your straining your jaw open so you can get that last digit of your index finger in there... you weirdo. 

Next, I believe, is the dough. Pizza dough CAN have a myriad of treats laced into it, chili flakes, cheese, that package of italian seasoning you buy even though your italian grandmother would 'smacka you upside da head' if she found out... But SHOULD it? Heck no! I'm building a thin crust pizza here, it has to be a homogeneous mixture of parts without chunks or bits to tear holes in your dough. Stretching pizza dough is difficult enough, and its hard on the dough too, so why have a rampant chili flake slice cavernous and entirely unwelcome holes in your otherwise beautiful dough? 

Now heres a touchy subject. Are you going to roll out your dough with a rolling pin, or stretch it by hand? I used to use both methods (how very diplomatic of me), because I like a wafer thin crust without flour dusting my entire house. I started by rolling the dough out till its thin enough to stretch under its own weight, and then I pick the dough up by its edge with both hands and stretch my hands apart, as the dough's weight stretches it downwards. This will reward you with a very uniformly thin pizza with few if any air bubbles, and is best used with doughs that are very elastic and would be difficult to stretch out entirely by hand. 

However, now that I have a brand new Kitchenaid mixer weighing down my countertop incase a breeze catches it, I can start to look into new and better doughs. The recipe I am currently working with is from an old Good Eats episode in season three (flat is beautiful) wherein a dough is made with only a small amount of yeast, and is allowed to age in the fridge overnight, producing enough yeast, as well as a whole heck of a lot of flavor for any pizza crust. A fringe benefit of this method is that by the time your twenty four hours are up, all the gluten in the dough is sufficiently relaxed and ready for a good stretch by hand, the preferred method.

Sauce is almost as hotly contested as an individuals dough recipe, and up until recently I was unable to make a sauce which met my desires. However some basic knowledge and some common sense will go a long way. Key points to remember are to ensure that your sauce has the right amount of water. Too much water and your crust is liable to become soggy, too little and the paste burns (whoever said a little bit of black was a bad thing on a pizza?). Also remember that you are effectively diluting your sauce with dough and toppings, so a sauce bordering on too strongly flavored will mellow slightly in the cooking process and balance out in the end.

What happens if my pizza sauce sucks? First, put down that bottle of ketchup! What else do you have around the house that can give you the flavors you need? Balsamic vinegars will balance out discrepancies in the sweet and sour department when simply adding sugar or acid wont do (I can hear your screams now, but give it a try). Lacking that tomato flavor? Perhaps you forgot the tomato paste. Its important, don't leave the tomato paste out (a little vodka helps bring out some of the tomatoes alcohol soluble flavors, but add it after the cooking process). Otherwise season with a heavy hand, use fresh ingredients, and go by taste. And don't be afraid to botch a couple batches. I can't tell you the number of pizzas I've eaten with sauce that was less than stellar. 

There isn't a whole lot to say about meat. Certain meats give off a lot of water while they cook, and make a sloppy mess of your pizza, whereas other meats which might crisp up and burn before your pizza is done will benefit from an insulating layer of mushrooms. You have to go with what you like, but do be wary of the water content, and in what position your meat should be in the layers of the pizza so it gets just the right amount of heat. 

A note on prosciutto. It goes on AFTER your pizza is cooked. Just trust me on this one. 

Mushrooms! Button, sliced as thinly as you can.

You must buy good cheese. No, I don't care that Safeway has a sale on brick-o-mozzarella, you will be rewarded by buying good cheese!

The best mozzarella I've had comes from my italian deli, and is kept in a brine bath. Its soft and very stringy when you pull it apart, and it has a slightly sour, slightly piquant flavor, though it is fairly mild all together. The idea is to tear apart the mozzarella into small pieces about half the size of your thumb, and then scatter them across the pizza. Your not looking to coat the entire surface... You don't work at little caesars after all.

I've recently experimented with buffalo mozzarella, which is creamier and softer than regular cow mozzarella, but I'm not sure its worth paying so much extra for.

Parmesan comes AFTER your pizza is cooked! But go ahead, do whatever you want... Just don't blame me for not warning you.

Finally, sometimes, when nobody is looking, I like to sprinkle a little bit of rock salt on top of the pizza after its cooked... Don't tell nobody.

Now, onto the recipe

For the sauce 

One (_____oz) can of whole skinless italian tomatoes. San Marzano is touted as the best for uncooked sauces, however as we are cooking this sauce and seasoning it heavily, go for whatever canned italian tomatoes that have the fewest ingredients

One large handful of fresh thyme with stems

5 or 6 whole stems of basil plus a small handful of leaves (stems have a lot of flavor, and you will remove them later)

One (_____oz) can of tomato paste

2 cloves garlic, crushed

Salt and pepper to taste 

sugar to taste

optional items:

One small handful desiccated onion flakes

Chili flakes to taste

One heaping tablespoon of your favorite italian herb mix (don't let your grandma see)

(photo of all ingredients together) 

Pour the can of tomatoes into a pot, crush between your fingers, and bring to a simmer. add the thyme and the basil stems. Simmer for at least 10 minutes

Push the sauce through a fine mesh sieve, with the back of a ladle, into a clean pot, and return to the stove. Add the tomato paste, garlic, the salt and pepper, and if using, the onion flakes, chili flakes, italian herb mix, and bring back to a simmer, stirring occasionally for another 10 minutes.

Taste your sauce. At this point all of the seasonings you have already added will have imparted a good amount of their flavor to the sauce, so now is the time to adjust the seasoning, and to add the sugar. A little sugar goes a long way, so add only a little at a time. Taste again in another minute. remember you are aiming for a very powerfully flavored sauce (photo) 

Adjust the heat to best maximize reduction. A quick simmer at first works well, and when the sauce starts to spit, reduce the heat. You can burn this sauce, so be careful. 

Once the sauce is fully reduced, and you are confidant that enough of the water has left so as to not soak into the crust, remove from the burner (photo of proper complete reduction).

The sauce gets better with age, and freezes well, so make extra. 

in the next article, i will be writing about the pizza dough and pulling this all together into a perfect pie.

A man can be summed up in a paragraph

Food has always held a great deal of majesty in my mind, from the simplest dishes with the greatest history, to the most complex and arcane that make you question the very nature of the food. 

I am searching for dishes that will make me inexplicably grin from ear to ear, dazzle my friends in elaborate displays of showmanship and artistry, and tell me stories of distant and exotic lands and cultures. 

My name is Patrick, I am a home chef with no training or professional experience, and this is my journey to find the magic in the delicious world of food.

Awww its so sweet isn't it?

Alternate ending: My name is Patrick, and i'll eat anything for a dollar