Gastronomist Economist, Issue 77: Passover 2024
Recipes to save for your next year's menu
Hello friends,
Welcome to issue 77 of the Gastronomist Economist! Some general housekeeping: You can find old issues here and a page of recipes with references to the issues where they were mentioned here. If you like this email, please forward it to a friend!
Before I share what I've been up to in the kitchen, I wanted to survey this crowd to see if anyone has any recommendations for non-dairy cheeses that you enjoy for any application. Please let me know if you do and how you use them! I'll let you know next month what I get up to with them!
In the meantime, between pre-Passover meals and the holiday itself, it was a busy month of cooking!
To use up some silken tofu, I made a silken tofu chocolate mousse involving dates, maple syrup, and cocoa powder in addition to the tofu. I added 1 teaspoon vanilla and 1/2 teaspoon instant coffee. I found the recipe as written to be way too sweet for me, especially as a breakfast food, and would try reducing the maple syrup to 1/8 cup, or maybe even less. To mellow the sweetness, I ended up adding a substantial amount of plain Greek yogurt. While I used my immersion blender, I think I could probably have gotten the mixture a little smoother had I used my food processor, and I would recommend soaking the dates in boiling water.
I also had an abundance of coleslaw mix to use up and made Smitten Kitchen's okonomiyaki, aka Japanese cabbage pancakes. I used about five cups of a cabbage/carrot mix plus one bunch of chopped scallions, a scant half cup of flour, and five eggs, and added some sesame oil and soy sauce in with the eggs. I served the pancakes with soy dipping sauce and sriracha mayo. It is worth noting that as I looked through my bookmarks for my okonomiyaki recipe, I came across this one from Food52, which, if you read the comments, you'll see that page previously landed at a different okonomiyaki recipe, which was subsequently replaced with the current recipe, and readers of the site were very upset about it. I managed to find the original recipe here and used it to tweak the Smitten Kitchen recipe.
For a Pre-Passover chicken dish, I made Sally's Baking Addiction's unbelievable walnut-crusted chicken. Having seen the recipe in an email with the word "unbelievable" in the title, I had to investigate it for myself. For the recipe, boneless skinless chicken breasts are marinated in a mixture of white wine, mustard, garlic, and thyme, then dredged in flour and chopped walnuts, then pan-seared, and ultimately finished in the oven and served with a honey-mustard glaze. One point to note that I missed is that the recipe suggests marinating the chicken for at least four and up to 12 hours, so you will want to factor that into your meal prepping unless you want to be having a late meal. Overall, I thought the dish was tasty, though I regretted not getting a consistently good sear on the chicken in the pan, as the parts that were well-seared were crisp and brought out the depth of flavor of the walnuts, while the less seared spots were less flavorful and had a soggier texture.
That brings us to Passover preparations. Not finding kosher-for-Passover prepared horseradish in my local stores, I made my own, loosely following Tori Avey's basic recipe for prepared horseradish. I didn't use the grating attachment but rather just put my pieces of peeled horseradish in my food processor. I added the vinegar after getting the horseradish to a fine consistency in the food processor, but regretted not adding the vinegar before processing because it was very intense!
For the seder meal, I started with a fish course of Leah Koenig's lox, curing salmon in equal parts by volume of salt and sugar. The main course was wine-braised brisket with tart cherries, though I did not sear the meat first, substituted water for chicken stock and cabernet sauvignon for pinot noir, did not use star anise, added a marrow bone, and did not blanch the carrots but included them for the full duration of cooking with the brisket. I found the sauce to be thin for my liking and tried to reduce some of it, so next time I would use less water or stock (one cup instead of two), but it did turn out quite nicely. For a vegetarian main, I made stuffed baby bella mushrooms filled with the sauteed chopped mushroom stems and garlic, thyme, lemon juice, and almond meal. The only change I would make next time would be to add a little balsamic vinegar. For dessert, we had a medley of cookies. First, Jamie Geller's Passover chocolate chip cookies - I used a 3.2-ounce package of pudding mix and a 1:1 substitution of refined coconut oil for the butter/margarine. The dough was a bit loose, so I let it firm up in the refrigerator before scooping. Next time, I might add a little extra matza cake meal and/or add only the directed amount (2.8 ounces) of pudding mix. As prepared, the cookies turned out to be delightfully crisp, if you're into that. For a second cookie, I made Smitten Kitchen's thumbprints with almond meal and jam, continuing my quest from last Passover to replicate the Manischewitz jelly top cookies of my youth. I used the matza meal variation of the recipe with "raspberry" jam as well as finely ground almond flour instead of ground hazelnuts and a 1:1 substitution of refined coconut oil for the butter/margarine. The cookies came out very nicely, but I would make a few tweaks for the next time: using 1 tablespoon less matza meal, strictly using only one tablespoon of dough per cookie, using more jam than the recipe suggests, and flattening each cookie to the desired thickness as they did not spread at all.
For a healthy-ish breakfast baked good, I made almond-flour blueberry muffins, using dried lemon zest instead of the prescribed cinnamon along with frozen blueberries, including a little more than prescribed. For me, the recipe made 16 muffins. I removed them from the oven 5 minutes early, and would have checked even earlier. I didn't think these were bad, and I will say that they had a nice texture for being completely almond-flour-based. However, the recipe doesn't include any oil/butter, only the almond meal, apple sauce, and eggs, and I felt that the mouthfeel would have benefitted from the inclusion of some oil or butter. Other tweaks I would make include using fresh lemon zest, using the prescribed volume of blueberries, increasing the salt to 3/4 teaspoon or 1 teaspoon, and using fresh blueberries as they might have concentrated more.
One of my Passover goals for this year was to identify a good sauce for enhancing chicken used in the service of making chicken soup. I borrowed from Chani Apfelbaum's barbeque brisket recipe to make a sauce consisting of 1/2 cup ketchup (blown away by the availability of kosher for Passover Heinz, which I had never seen before), 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar, 1/2 cup packed brown sugar, 1.5 tsp smoked paprika, 1.5 tsp paprika, 1/2 tsp onion powder, 1/2 tsp garlic powder, and red pepper flakes to taste. I combined all the ingredients in a saucepan and brought the mixture to a boil and reduced to my desired thickness, about 20 minutes. I really enjoyed it, though if I'd had more time, I could have used real onion and garlic and softened before adding the other ingredients, then pureeing after reducing. Next time, I would reduce the brown sugar to 1/3 cup and might also try reducing the vinegar to 1/3 cup.
I also made the quick gravlax recipe I shared in the Detroit Jewish News, and I was indeed impressed that it replicated the long-cured flavor in much less time. I erroneously used a little more salt and sugar than the recipe called for, which was in line with some other recipes I had come across. My only real deviation from the recipe was rinsing the liquid off the salmon before eating. I'm glad to have this recipe in my back pocket for a quick indulgence.
I hope everyone observing Passover had a lovely holiday - I would love to hear about any dishes you made and really loved (or really didn't). And I hope you are enjoying a wonderful start to spring!
Until next time,
Joelle