Vegetarian – Page 4 – melaniepatrick.de

Mayonnaise. The real thing.

Mayo. Who doesn’t love it? The best flavor enhancer I can think of – deviled eggs, ham, salad, fondue, sandwiches, cooked vegetables all taste much better with a glob of the white stuff.

And it’s a very versatile base for other sauces: add some simple ingredients and there’s a whole new world of exiting variations. For example, add some garlic and you have aioli, add ketchup and cognac and there you have a simple Russian dressing (salsa golf as the South Americans call it). Or capers and gherkins and you get remoulade. The possibilities are endless and I’m showing you some of the more exiting fondue sauces in the future.

Just like pesto, I especially like the stuff made from scratch. And it’s not that hard as you might think. Just some basic physics. Here we go:

MAYONNAISE / MAYO

1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon mustard (I prefer Dijon)
salt and pepper
ca. 1 cup vegetable oil (not olive oil – it will taste too bitter)
juice of 1/2 lemon (amount depending to taste and desired consistency)

First of all, separate the egg yolk from the white. Put the yolk in a bowl, add mustard, salt and pepper and leave it there for at least 15 minutes (you should definitively cover it if you have cats…). Meanwhile, freeze the egg white in a big ice cube tray – you can use it later for an angel food cake, a pavlova or macarons.

Why would you leave the egg yolk on the kitchen counter? To get an emulsion (i.e., water and oil not acting like they hate each other), all ingredients must have the same temperature. As I keep eggs and mustard in the fridge but the oil in a regular shelf, the oil will be much warmer than the rest. So, an emulsion would be rather unlikely.

Why add mustard? First of all, it tastes good. But in chemical terms – just like egg yolks – mustard contains substances that help building an emulsion (they are called emulgators). The more emulgators, the more likely you will get a good mayonnaise.

Get out your favorite whisk and stir the yolks and the mustard. It should now look like a uniform mass. Add ONE DROP of oil and stir until you see no more traces of the oil. Add some more drops and stir until you can’t see the oil no more. Repeat. And gradually increase the amount of oil, just be sure to stir until you have a homogeneous mass before adding more oil.

If you find that the stirring gets harder, add some lemon juice (but not together with oil – you want to keep them separate). You will see that the mayo will get softer and a bit whiter. Give it a taste. If it tastes good, you’re done!

Why lemon juice? Well, of course it tastes good – otherwise the mayonnaise would taste just like the oil you used. As as an emulsion consists of oil and water, you’ll have to add something watery to all that oil. Otherwise, the emulsion will break.

Add more oil if you like to have more mayonnaise – one single egg yolk can take 2 cups of oil easily. Just add enough lemon juice.

So, what do you do if the emulsion breaks anyway? (You’ll notice if the mix is more liquid, looking like oil with yellow specks.) Take a second egg yolk and let it get to room temperature (no need to add more mustard or salt). Do as if the broken mayonnaise was just oil, add one drop and stir… go on until you have a creamy mayonnaise and you have used up all the oily stuff.

One more thing: this contains raw eggs. If you are pregnant, have very small kids or if you have a weak immune system, you should not eat raw eggs. But there’s a solution: Follow the recipe as above, only use a cooked egg yolk. The mayo will not be as velvety, but delicious nevertheless.

Chimichurri. My favorite BBQ sauce.

My mom was born and raised in Argentina – and learned to cook from an Italian family. So despite growing up in Germany, I almost never had typical German meals at home. Instead, there was often homemade pasta, gnocchi, lasagna and cannelloni. And the occasional BBQ in the summer that was impossible without this sauce. Everyone has their own recipe, and even mine is very different from the chimichurri my mom makes. There must be millions of variants: red or green, hot or mild, sweet or sour, thick or thin.

This is for Ben and Bryan – my New Zealand mates who liked to eat it straight from the jar with a spoon…

CHIMICHURRI

1 large glass jar (best is an open-mouthed jam or gherkin jar)
boiling water
1 large onion
5 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon paprika powder
1 teaspoon dried chili flakes
5 tablespoons dried Italian herbs (basil, rosemary, sage, parsley, thyme)
salt and pepper to taste
6 tablespoons white or cider vinegar
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup ketchup

Place the jar and its lid in your kitchen sink and fill both with boiling water. Leave it like that for at least 10 minutes – this is for sterilizing the jar, so that the sauce keeps longer (not that it ever lasted in my fridge that long so that it would have gone bad…).

Meanwhile, finely chop the onion and the garlic cloves. Empty the glass jar – be careful not to burn your fingers – place it on your working surface and fill in the garlic and onion dices.

The onions should come up to 1/3 to max. 1/2 of the height of the jar. Bring more water to boil and just cover the onions – that makes them softer and less harsh in taste.

Yeah, the label is still on the jar, my brother and I were too lazy to remove it.

Add all the dry spices and give it all a stir. Then pour in the ketchup, the vinegar and the olive oil. Give it a taste and then place it in the fridge till you need it.

Oh, and it’s one of the most versatile sauces: apart from tasting great with grilled stuff (like steaks, sausages, mushrooms, vegetables, etc.) you can also use it as marinade for chicken and as a salad dressing. Or simply dip in some bread or your finger…

Pesto. Not from a supermarket shelf.

I love pesto. It tastes great on pasta, you can use it on pizzas or chicken, it even helps putting some taste in an otherwise boring tomato or bechamel sauce.

Problem is, once you have tasted the homemade stuff, you’re never going back to the jars and plastic bags from the supermarket. On the other hand it’s very simple to make at home. You can also use a blender or food processor instead of pestle and mortar, but personally I like to see some bits and pieces.

Parmesan cheese is practically lactose free – like the most hard cheeses. Check the carbohydrates section on the nutrition facts: If a cheese (or any other dairy product without added sugar) has less than 0,5 grams of sugars/carbohydrates per 100 grams, then you can consider it lactose free (for me, even up to 1,5 grams is OK). If you are hyper-lactose-intolerant, better leave the cheese out or substitute it with toasted bread crumbs. Then it’s even vegan!

PESTO ALLA GENOVESE

2 plants of basil
1/4 – 1/2 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon coarse salt
3 cloves garlic cloves
3 tablespoons pine nuts
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese/toasted bread crumbs
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
a nice jar with tight fitting lid

First, buy 2 plants of basil. Make sure the leaves look all fresh and green and that the stems are standing more or less upright. DO NOT WASH the basil. It takes away a good bit of flavor and – more importantly – you’ll end up having too much water in your paste, which reduces shelf life drastically. Don’t worry, most plants nowadays have grown up in greenhouses and were never in contact with exhaust gases and such.

Time to be brutal. Cut off all the stems right above the earth, then separate the leaves from the stems. Place the leaves in your grinding vessel. I use pestle and mortar made of granite. It weighs over 6 kg.

Add 1/4 cup olive oil and 1 teaspoon salt, then start pounding/mixing/pulsing (depending on the tool you use) until all the leaves are squished but still some big parts left.. It’s important to add the oil and the salt to the leaves in the beginning, as the oil prevents oxidation (i.e. the leaves turning into a ghastly brown goo) and the salt helps as a grinding agent.

Now put in the garlic cloves and the pine nuts and pound/mix/pulse them with the basil oil until you have the consistency you like. As I said, I like it when there are still some bits left. Put in the Parmesan cheese and now just stir it in. Unless of course, you want to have a homogeneous paste, go on pulsing it down… Add some more olive oil if you like or if the pesto seems crumbly.

Fill the pesto into a nice little jar and try to get as few air bubbles as possible. Flatten the surface by hammering the jar (lightly) on the counter, then top it off with some vegetable oil. Why not olive oil? The oil serves as air barrier to prevent oxidation (that is your nice green pesto turning brown). Olive oil crystallizes in the refrigerator, so chances are that your oxidation barrier will break.