Pandemic recipes

I say this half-jokingly, half-defensively: I had a sourdough starter before the pandemic.

I use grams because it’s easier to reason in, but use Fahrenheit because it’s what I think in. Lousy Americans! (Apparently Canadians also suffer from similar partial metricization.)

Maximally lazy, “impaired” at 3 a.m. mac & cheese

About 100g of cheese is what I think one serving for a reasonable individual is. I make no claims of being reasonable. Required equipment: decent kitchen scale. Based on the Modernist Cuisine recipe, with several labor-saving enhancements.



1. Put saucepan on scale, tare. Add cheese broken into chunks. Ask smart assistant at hand what both 4% and 85% of that number are and add the appropriate amounts of sodium citrate and milk; no need to pre-stir or shred here. Heat on medium-low, stirring to prevent sticking to the pot, then finally whisking as the cheese melts and emulsifies. Turn down to low when sauce is fully emulsified.
2. Meanwhile, eyeball the appropriate amount of pasta into a skillet because we aren’t gonna wait for an entire goddamn pot of water to come to a boil, are we. Cover with water and add a few pinches of salt. Heat on high, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Cook to al dente and drain.
3. Add cooked pasta to cheese sauce. Season to taste with whatever: salt, pepper (freshly cracked, lots), mustard (dijon or grainy or both), vermouth, Maggi seasoning, hot sauce, fish sauce, hell, MSG if you have it. Frozen veg small enough to cook through quickly. Leftover sausage or bacon or Spam®, diced. The sauce thickens as it cools so thin with more milk as necessary. It depends on on how much water your chosen cheese and flavorings bring to the dish.

Cold, set emulsified cheese requires more elbow grease to remove, so clean the pots and dishware as soon as possible. As is often the case, being maximally lazy requires one to put forth a little effort up front to avoid expending much more effort later. Store any leftovers in glass and reheat with a tiny amount of liquid, stirring occasionally.

Grilled romaine salad

This is like, barely a recipe? I throw this together on autopilot, using the oil from the sardine tin to minimize waste, and a Searzall (because I’m That Kind of Guy), with whatever acids and herbs &c I have on hand. Serves two.

1. Brush cut side of hearts of romaine with reserved oil. Grill, or broil ~4″ from the element until charred but not burned, 3-5 minutes.
2. Transfer to serving plates. Drizzle with more of the reserved oil. Add several drops balsamic, then sardines, sprinkle with other vinegars or juice or hot sauce, herbs, alliums and/or capers, plenty of kosher salt and freshly cracked pepper, and grate or microplane over plenty of cheese. Break out the steak knives and serve warm.

Biscuits, stat; two kinds

No way am I going to bother making super-flaky biscuits or grating frozen butter or whatever. It’s a damned biscuit, anything more than the recipe on the back of the White Lily bag is, well, gilding.

These are mere quick biscuits, then, written so I remember what's important. I don’t even measure the liquid, really, just eyeball it with small additions until it makes a dough.

Make the self-raising flour

At baking time you can add a smidge of baking soda to improve browning, and ~supposedly~ a hint of sugar improves browning and moisture retention.

Your standard cut biscuit:

For each cup self-raising flour:

1. Preheat oven to 475°F.
2. Add shortening to flour, break into pea-size chunks. Add just enough liquid, whisking with a fork until a dough forms. (If dry flour remains, remove the barely-formed dough to the floured work surface and add small amounts of liquid until the remainder comes together; it’s easy to over-wet or over-work the formed dough.)
3. Turn out onto lightly floured work surface. Using the heel of your palm, flatten into a ½″ disc, cut into fourths, stack with sides roughly aligned, and re-flatten to ½″. Cut into desired shapes, gathering trimmings and re-forming but once. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake until golden brown and >200°F on the inside, about 10 minutes.

Or a black pepper & cheddar cheese cream biscuit:

For each cup self-raising flour:

1. Preheat oven to 475°F.
2. Grind black pepper into self-raising flour. When you think you’re done, grind more. Your nose should at least tingle. Whisk; it should be well-speckled. Toss in cheese and herbs, if using. Add cream until combined and slightly tacky. (If your dough reaches this stage and there is still dry flour, again, remove dough and drizzle liquid to incorporate the dry mixture.)
3. Grease a ¼ cup measure and scoop onto parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake until turning golden brown and cheese is caramelizing on the pan, about 15 minutes..

Standard sourdough

M.F.K. Fisher, in How to Cook a Wolf, railed against nutrient-deficient white bread and flour (enriched flour was barely a thing, yet) and praised “dark nutty moist” albeit plebian whole wheat loaves. Reading it last summer, I was inspired to stop leaning on 90/10 bread/whole wheat flour, and went 100% whole wheat, which yielded some boules resembling slightly domed hockey pucks. While searching around I read that hydrating bran and incorporating it later in the process yielded better results. Since sifting the bran out of a kilo of flour is tedious and impractical in a small apartment kitchen, I settled again on a combination of bread flour and whole wheat, with additional bran added later to bring it close to the ratio found in whole wheat flour.

This is not a ’gram optimized loaf; done right, the crumb is relatively even and closed, without being dense, perfect for grilled sandwiches and spreading still-too-cold-from-the-fridge butter. Stays moist for days, although the crust gets quite chewy.

To keep the recipe compact, I assume you already know the basics about sourdough. My starter is a liquid starter that’s 50/50 bread flour/whole wheat. (I’m a simple man, given to prosaic, whole-number ratios.)

Target temp: 76°F. 100% flour = 1200g is about the max dough that will fit in a 6 qt. mixer, and yields two roughly 1kg loaves.

1. Combine flours and water in bowl of stand mixer with dough hook. Autolyse at least 1 hr and up to two.
2. Fully incorporate starter. The dough will be pretty stiff at this point and want to climb the hook. Wait 10 minutes or so. Create salt mixture and hydrate bran mixture.
3. Fully incorporate salt mixture. Knead for a minute or so.
4. Using hook, scraper, and your hands, incorporate the hydrated bran/germ in a couple batches. Your job here is to do things the dough hook cannot, dimpling it into the dough, or flipping the mass over. (If the hook seems to spin a knot of dough around, or the mass slides around the bowl, let the dough rest for a minute.) Continue kneading until dough fully comes together, added water is absorbed, and bran is evenly incorporated and trapped in the gluten matrix. It will clear the sides of the bowl but end up looking like a giant slightly stringy wet mess; this is fine. Wipe up the sides of the bowl with a damp cloth and cover with a plate for bulk ferment.
5. Fold dough every 30-45 minutes with a wet hand during bulk ferment, four to five times total. I typically do a “fold, 180° turn, fold, 90° turn, repeat” to bring opposite sides over each other until taut, about 6-8 folds. I add some extra folds and 45° turns the first time, when it’s very slack, which probably doesn’t accomplish anything but makes me feel better.
6. After about 4 hours, dough should be nearly doubled in size but should not present with very large bubbles. Divide, shape, proof, &c as desired, though I never push cold ferment farther than overnight. Bake with standard dutch oven method until well-burnished.

Whole-chicken chicken soup with collard greens and farro

Early in the pandemic David Chang made a post about just Boiling the Hell Out of a Chicken and I tried that and decided, uh, low and slow was better.

And collards. I love collards but rarely bother with fresh when the par-cooked frozen stuff is done in half the time with no effort. This takes long enough to cook as it is, although it’s largely unattended.

For the stock:

To make the soup:

1. Add chicken to a stock pot with the rough mirepoix and other stock seasonings, a generous pinch of kosher salt, and cover with water, about a gallon; bring to a simmer and hold for at least two hours, skimming scum and fat occasionally.
2. As for the breasts:
   • If you don’t want to fuss with the sous vide, add breasts to the stock pot as well; pull once the thickest part of the breast reaches >150°F.
   • Season breasts with salt and pepper and sous vide at 140°F to 150°F while stock simmers; I prefer this method to prevent overcooking and to be less hands-on. To be honest, I don’t have one of those alarm-type thermometers, and every time I tried to catch it in the pot it ended up that overcooked, sort of tacky texture.
3. Remove chicken from pot/sous vide bath. Strain stock into another pot, along with juices from sous vide.
4. Heat stock to a boil, add frozen collard greens and bring back to a simmer. Cook to package directions, about thirty minutes. Ten minutes before collards are done, add farro and soup vegetables.
5. Meanwhile, once chicken is cool enough to handle, remove leg meat and dice it up along with breast meat. I don’t bother removing the meat from the wings. Discard carcass, or—if you are miserly like me—let cool and freeze it with your other chicken carcasses for remouillage since it's not totally spent.

6. Add diced chicken to pot and heat through. Season to taste with salt, pepper, MSG, maggi seasoning, vinegar, hot sauce, &c. Serve with a spoonful of schmaltz, or a glug of grassy olive oil.

Whole chicken Wellington-ish double-crust pot pie

You can possibly smell the desperation of a man told to quit eating red meat from where you sit. It makes for a neat pie cross-section, anyway.

You’ll need a deep dish 9″ pie plate, usually labeled as holding 1½ quarts. This is written down from eyeballing it and having some filling left over, so next time I’ll probably omit the potato.

Pie crust and lining:

A single, that’s 1×, Graham crust can be made with 115g Graham flour plus 60g AP flour, and one more tbsp. water for bran hydration, otherwise following this recipe. You should be able to pick up Graham flour from a bougie supermarket with a sufficiently advanced Bob’s Red Mill section, though I always end up buying it from Anson Mills.

For the filling:

1. Roll out half the pie dough and line deep 9″ pie plate; place in proofing bag and chill.
2. Make duxelles and set aside until needed.
3. Steam broccoli (about 4 minutes) until it can be pierced with a paring knife.If feeling extra fancy, let cool then char the broccoli along with the carrot after this step.
4. Boil potato from cold in salted water until it can be pierced with a paring knife, about 10 minutes.
5. In a high-walled sauté pan or dutch oven, melt some of the fat over medium heat. Sear off some of the meat, not enough to crowd the pan, and remove. Add onions with pinch salt and cook until translucent. Add carrot and celery and cook until slightly softened. Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds, or until fragrant.
6. Melt in remaining fat. Add flour and form a roux. Add white wine or vermouth. In batches, add stock. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer and let become quite thick. Mix in remaining vegetables, chicken, and hardy herbs. Add heavy cream until desired color is reached. Reduce further if necessary, it needs to be a sliceable consistency at serving temp. Season generously with salt and pepper, parsley, and a bit of nutmeg if desired. Taste and add vinegar if the acid from the wine is very muted. Let cool to room temp, stirring pot over ice bath and refrigerating if under time pressure.
7. Line bottom and sides of pie dough with duxelles, about ⅛″ thick, then a thin layer of dijon. Add filling; having some left over is fine, don’t let it exceed the rim of the dish. Roll out and top with remaining crust, crimp and cut vents as desired. Refrigerate for about thirty minutes.
8. Move rack to lower third, line it with parchment or a well-seasoned baking sheet, and preheat oven to 425°F. Egg wash top crust and sprinkle with plenty of flaky salt. Bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown and bubbly. Let cool on a rack before serving.

Collected recipes, and notes

A list of things I wish I’d been told, in no particular order

• You don’t need oven mitts, you need side towels. Buy cheap ones in large quantities.
• Under heavy use, you have to sharpen knives every few weeks. An inexpensive 1000/6000 grit whetstone is fine to start. (Soak the 1000 grit side only on a plate.) Practice grinding angles on cheap stamped paring and chef’s knives, you can’t reshape a cutting edge without a shitton of grinding on 1000 grit stone, so it is relatively hard to screw up, and
• If you need to work on your knife skills, a bag of onions is cheap. Get your knife razor-sharp and get to chopping. The host of the largest YouTube cooking channel, with his own cutlery line, turns his fingers toward the blade while chopping. This prevented me from developing any sort of impostor syndrome.
• Putting a Ruhlman hat on for a moment: a serving of hollandaise is ½ tsp dijon, 1 tbsp. lemon juice, 2 yolks, 3 tbsp. butter, plus cayenne and salt, thinned with water to achieve consistency. Like mayonnaise, the (stick) blender hack is pointless; just whisk over a double boiler.

Things change

Bitterness was bred out of brussels sprouts in the 90s and aughts. The language they use in the article seems to dance around those three letters that strike fear into white people who do not understand relative risk. It’s not just improved cooking methods. Conversely, saran wrap sucks now as it was reformulated in the aughts to remove chemicals known to the state of cancer to cause California.

Jacques Pépin’s Chicken Galantine

It takes a few tries to get into the swing of it, but it’s a remarkably fast way to prepare a chicken, and you can use up stale bread and slightly wilty vegetables to make the stuffing. If your chicken came with giblets, fry them in butter with alliums, mince them up, and add them to the stuffing. Plus you can use the carcasses and wings for

Pressure cooker chicken stock

Also available in brown stock. Killing an animal is sin enough, why let it go to waste?

Neven Mrgan’s sourdough bagels

Low enough hydration that it sounds like it’ll break my stand mixer gearbox, but delicious.

WSU Bread Lab Approachable Loaf

After getting both bored with and fat on sourdough boules I abandoned them for a bit. When rebooting my sourdough starter, I went for this easy bread. Even better, use the James Beard method of reconstituting raisins in sherry for a whole wheat cinnamon-swirl bread.

Bravetart’s blitz-style pie dough

Bravetart “Impossible” pecan pie

This came out great on the first try despite it being my first pie ever, so clearly I am a genius. Or am capable of following directions. I’m sure it’s the former.

Green Chartreuse toddy

I’ve seen many variations on this and I cannot fathom the fact that people put more sugar into this. Green Chartreuse already has so much! Anyway: 1 oz green chartreuse, ½ oz brandynot that sweet cheap stuff, a mid-grade cognac or armagnac or bourbon, ¼ oz lemon juice, 4 oz hot water. Preheated glass, no garnish. Guaranteed to knock you out after a harried night of doomscrolling.