Book Club Bites: Cauliflower Soup with Balsamic-Olive “Caviar”

People have asked me why there aren’t more modernist cuisine (aka molecular gastronomy) dishes in Food Whore. You know, foams and clouds, things made with aerators and anti-griddles. I find that type of cooking extremely fascinating, but looking back, I must have subconsciously only included dishes I know and understand. I’ve never experimented with sodium alginate or soy lecithin. Never made a consommé with a centrifuge.

But there is one exception -- “potato pearls with black, green, and crimson ‘caviar’ in a cauliflower cream nage”, which pops up in Chapter 14. You can easily make “caviar” using agar-agar, a plant-based gelatin that’s available in health food stores, gourmet shops, and Asian markets. It looks fancy, but it’s not. And the process is so fun. 

INGREDIENTS

A video posted by Jessica Tom (@jessica_tom) on Oct 15, 2015 at 8:08am PDT

“Caviar”
8 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons Kalamata olive brine
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 grams powdered agar-agar
vegetable oil

Soup
1 head of cauliflower (about 1.5 lbs)
2 shallots
1 large white onion
5 cups of water
olive oil
salt
ground pepper 

Fill a tall glass with vegetable oil and place in the freezer for 30 minutes. Briefly boil the balsamic vinegar, olive brine and fish sauce with the agar-agar, until dissolved. Using a pipette, drop the liquid into the cold oil. The drops will immediately solidify and turn into spheres. (If yours don’t, try chilling your oil longer or using a taller glass. The droplets need to cool and congeal by the time they reach the bottom of the glass). Refrigerate until ready to use.

In a large pot, heat olive oil and sweat chopped shallots and onion on low for about 15 minutes. They should be translucent and not brown (you want the soup to be as white as possible so the “caviar” will visually pop).

Add diced cauliflower and water and boil on medium-high for 20 minutes, until cauliflower is very soft but not sulfurous (as overcooked cauliflower is prone to be). Add one tablespoon of butter and blend on the highest setting your blender has. You want the soup very, very smooth.   

Let the soup cool for 10 minutes, so the “caviar” doesn’t melt. Spoon the “caviar” on top. Serves 4-6.   

Book Club Bites: Salade Nicoise

There’s an important scene in Food Whore where Tia is feeling lost. Her personal life and secret life with Michael Saltz are starting to clash and she’s not sure how she'll sort it out.

Her friend asks her to grab a bite and they go to a nice-ish deli near Washington Square Park. You know, one of the ones with a decent salad bar. As she’s thinking, she absent-mindedly adds items to her container: arugula, tuna, mustard, olives… until she makes an accidental Salade Niçoise.

“I mixed and tasted and went back for other ingredients until the tuna salad was near perfect. It was filling and bracing and pickled. It didn’t taste like bodega food at all. The simple act of cooking and tasting calmed me like nothing else.”

Surprise, surprise, I also love Salade Niçoise. The appeal is its remarkable harmony. Every player is assertive: fragrant tuna, briny olives, meaty haricot verts, plush hard-boiled eggs, spicy arugula. And yet together, they harmonize. The salad surely doesn’t need cheese or bacon, both auto-tune for salad, ways to increase tastiness by masking the ingredients. This is hearty and flavorful, with each component keeping its integrity. 

In my mind, the defining characteristics of a Salade Niçoise are: boiled potatoes, blanched haricot verts, Niçoise olives, hard-boiled eggs, and high-quality tuna. Other people may want to put anchovy in there, but to me, olives and tuna add enough saltiness. Once you have those ingredients, you can really play around with the rest. The recipe below doesn’t have precise proportions -- just mix and match, salad-bar-bodega style.

RECIPE:

Dressing: Using a mortar and pestle, grind three cloves of garlic with one tablespoon of salt until pasty. Add to a bowl along with ⅓ cup of olive oil, 1 minced shallot, the juice of 2 lemons, 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and black pepper to taste. Whisk and set aside.

Boiled Components: If you have the time, you might as well cook everything in the same pot of boiling water (as opposed to having three pots at once, which is somewhat wasteful and adds a lot of unnecessary heat to your kitchen -- critical if you’re making this in the summer).

Add water to a large saucepan and heavily salt. Bring to a boil. Add purple potatoes and four eggs. After 7-10 minutes (depending on how you like your eggs), remove the eggs and cool them off in a bowl of ice water. Add trimmed haricot verts and cook for 2 minutes. Remove and add to another bowl of ice water. Check potatoes with a fork -- the cooking time depends on the size. Remove when a fork easily slips in, with no “crunch” sound.

Before you assemble, cut the eggs in halves or quarters. Cut the potatoes into bite-sized pieces.

Classic Components:
Tomatoes - I like Kumato because they’re sweet and not too tart. But any tomato will do. Cut into wedges.
Radishes 
Cucumber - English or mini. You want a compact cucumber that isn’t too watery.
Olives - I used oil-cured black olives because they are one of my favs. But Niçoise olives are the classic.
Herbs - scallions, basil, chervil

Wildcard Components:
Beets
Fiddlehead ferns
Microgreens - here, I used mustard micro greens
Pickled Cipollini Onions

Assembly:
On a large plate, arrange a bed of arugula. Add your other ingredients. Top with high-quality olive oil-packed tuna. My favorite is this yellowfin tuna from Ortiz. You can buy it at Whole Foods or Zingermans. (True, you can’t find imported Spanish tuna at a bodega salad bar. But just go with it.)

Drizzle with dressing and serve.