One of my major rants after nearly a decade and a half of writing restaurant reviews, food columns, and working on a cookbook is that there is lots of outright bad and uninteresting food on America’s tables and repetitious, boring menus that never change in its restaurants. To make my point, how hard is it to find a great burger, good fish and chips, or a mouthwatering steak, much less a tasty BLT?
Part of this can be blamed on restaurants catering to an audience that thinks and needs flavor coming from copious amounts of salt, added sugar, and sugary sauces. Chefs and restaurant owners have often told me that patrons reject anything not heavily flavored with those additives. I recently tried chili and Boston clam chowder on separate days at a new restaurant. It was snowing, and I felt like a hearty, moderate-calorie lunch. My chili tasted like the salt shaker lid had fallen off, and I could hardly detect any of the slowly simmered beef and capsicum flavor. The chowder was so salty that I couldn’t taste any of the clams or find clam flavor in the stock.
It’s not just a characteristic of cooking in the United States, either. Trying a new cuisine on a fly-fishing adventure to Chile excited my fishing buddies and me, and in Coyhaique, a jumping-off point in Chile for Patagonia and its fishing and trekking, there was a moderate-priced restaurant run by fireman in the back of a fire station, certainly an ingenious use of space and down time. The food looked sumptuous, but it was nearly inedible because of excessive salt on everything.
Later, in the outback at Picacho Lodge, we ran into the same problem. This remote location rafted in kitchen interns from a Chilean culinary academy.
Chilean food is known for its blandness. The best restaurants in South America are Peruvian, because of their chefs’ bold use of flavor, often citrus based. The Chilean interns were taught to oversalt to mitigate the blandness. Our-low-salt-diet group of senior men had to ask that salt content be lowered. “Let us salt to our tastes at the table.” It was affecting our taste buds and the enjoyment of our host’s fine wines. He was a director of the prestigious Santiago Wine Group, and a raft load of Chile’s and Argentina’s best had come down the river that week. These wines are treasured and not exported. The cooks did respond, and our farewell dinner of a freshly killed lamb cooked over coals on an iron cross remains one of the most memorable meals of my lifetime.
So how do we give variety and flavor to meals without salt and sugar in excess? Making your own sauces and salsas is one answer. Sauces evolved as means of hiding less than optimal ingredient quality before refrigeration, when food was often tainted. Today, salsas often appear in place of sauces in fine restaurants, but require an understanding of flavor balance. Done well, both can raise the bar in outdoor cooking without a huge amount of effort.
Learning how to make and use pan sauces judiciously is a step up the ladder of culinary prowess. Basics include use of the pan residue of meats or fish, often sautéed after a dusting in seasoned flour. Reserve the meat, then deglaze the pan and its residue with a liquid, often wine, acidic citrus, or stock, mixing well. Turn the heat up to reduce the liquid and concentrate the flavors. Adjust the flavoring after tasting. When balanced, all these sauces dramatically enhance the flavor of your dish, but be careful. Over do it, and a too-intense sauce can ruin your centerpiece entrée.
In my Aunt Mable’s chicken-fried steak recipe, she fries tenderized round steak in bacon grease after generously dredging the meat in her secret-recipe seasoned flour. She then uses fresh cream from her cows to deglaze the residue of meat and flour bits in the pan and adds just a small pinch of sugar, stirring in flour mixed with more cream as needed. We call the end result “gravy,” but in reality, it is a pan sauce. It is not easy to do well.
One simple pan sauce that complements, but doesn’t overpower a meat entrée uses the flavors of red wine. At home, sauté a steak for a few minutes on either side and put it in a 425-degree oven for five more minutes. Then remove it, and while the medium-rare steak is resting, covered with foil, pulling back its juices, deglaze the pan residue with a red wine of choice, then add some low-sodium beef stock. I like zinfandel, merlot, or a lighter cabernet from California. Why use California wines? More sunshine in the fruit. In camp, without an oven, cook the meat a bit more in the skillet to medium rare, remove and cover with foil, then turn up the heat momentarily and start deglazing and reducing, releasing and concentrating the flavors. Remember that steak keeps cooking after being removed from the heat source.
A restaurant chef’s trick is to enhance flavors further with a dollop of classic veal and beef demiglace. At the now defunct San Francisco Culinary Academy, we used 110-gallon electric-powered stainless steel vats to reduce roasted vegetables, meat trimmings, and bones into a dark demiglace gel. Smaller portions of premade demiglace can be purchased at finer markets and gourmet delis. I keep small packets from More Than Gourmet in my pantry and travel with it if I anticipate the need for it when cooking in camp on a fishing trip. Larger portions keep well for months in a refrigerator and bring the cost down. Veal/beef demiglace does amazing things for stews of all types. A favorite beef stew uses it with carrots, onions, mushrooms, and well-trimmed beef chuck. Demiglace is available in chicken flavors, too, and in my favorite version, duck . . . glace de canard.
A meunière sauce for fish is particularly good with locally caught petrale sole or other white-meat denizens of the depths. Dredge the fish in seasoned flour and fry it in clarified butter, then use lemon juice to deglaze the pan residue and add chopped parsley. If available, try Meyer lemons, which have a distinct sunshine flavor and are slightly less acidic, with a hint of aromatic sweetness, but not much more. Acid used sparingly compliments most fish. Some cooks add more flour to the pan, then white wine and capers. Once more, don’t overdo it. You want to complement delicate fish flavors, not hide or disguise them.
The same goes for salsas. My wife Karen worked in San Francisco near the emerging gourmet ghetto neighborhood around Hayes Street and Van Ness Avenue. After a Friday night glass of wine, she proudly announced that she had gotten the last two seats at superstar chef Jeremiah Tower’s Saturday morning cooking class featuring sauces. I jumped at the chance, expecting to receive a warmup on the brown and béchamel sauces of classic French cooking.
Tower briefly touched on pan sauces, but he then went directly to fruit salsas, which were not then commonly used in restaurant cooking. Fruit is naturally sweet, so salsa flavors can be ruined with added sugar, which overpowers the flavors of delicate meats and fish. They are very easy to make, though, using fresh, uncooked fruit, or better yet with pan heat and caramelization to marry and delicately intensify flavors.
Chef Bobby Flay took salsas to another level a decade or so after Tower. Flay consistently won Iron Chef America, Beat Bobby Flay, and Throwdown with Bobby Flay competitions because of his use of fruit, flavored vinegars, and knowledge of the both subtle and intense flavors of Mexican, New Mexican, and Asian peppers. His was a bold and vivacious version of Southwest cooking.
A road trip that paused in Las Vegas took Karen and me to Bobby’s Mesa Grill. We have never experienced such electricity in a restaurant. The combination of anticipation, unique food and flavor offerings, preparation excellence, inviting presentation, and the aura of a celebrity chef lit it up. We ordered a cross section of small plates to sample to get ideas we could take home. Our favorite dish was duck tacos, a Southwestern take on classic Chinese Peking duck in a Chinese-style steamed bun. When we switched from a heavy Zinfandel to a light, lower-alcohol rosé that didn’t overpower the food, the flavors married and exploded. We left for the Grand Canyon the next day with a hangover.
On a restaurant review expedition tied into a speaking engagement in Santa Barbara, I found dry chipotle peppers at a booth in that historic town’s famous State Street Farmers’ Market. Chipotles are dried, smoked Jalapeno peppers. I bought a year’s supply. A simple camp and at-home recipe evolved: sautéed salmon with a dusting of coarsely ground chipotle, cilantro butter, and a squeeze from a slice of lime, garnished with more cilantro. Any cook hopes to provide exciting meals that both highlight the intrinsic quality of ingredients and pique interest with new flavors. In outdoor cooking, we have the built-in advantage of fresh air, breathtaking waterside settings, and good company that brings joy to our meals and provides us with wonderful memories. Leave the salt shaker and sugar spoon in the pantry. Experiment with sauces and salsas and enhance your dining experience both at home and in camp.
The Good Wolf Brewing Company: A New Option in Truckee
The hoppin’ Truckee beer scene was last featured in our September/October 2018 issue. Since then, there’s been a significant change: the Tahoe Mountain Brewing Company has closed (rumored to reopen later this year in an historical building near downtown), and its tasting room and brewing space have been taken over by the Good Wolf Brewing Company. The brewery is located in an industrial area just north of Interstate 80, housed in a nondescript commercial building at the rear of the Industrial Way cul-de-sac. The Artist and I dropped by late in the afternoon several weeks after it opened to the public. What one quickly notices when entering The Good Wolf is that the taproom has been redecorated. No longer does it share the minimalistic interior design that craft breweries seem to gravitate toward these days. Instead, the space personifies the interests, values, and aesthetic sense of the owners. Much of the room, dare I say, is even cozy, with comfy furniture, a piano, and a convivial, yet intimate grotto-like feel. There’s an obvious appreciation of the natural world, with mosses, greenery, and other woodsy ephemera on the walls and ceiling, all reflecting one of the objectives of the brewery — “forest inspired beers.”
As a fan of products that embody the character of the place where they’re created, I asked the young man behind the bar for a forest-inspired beer. None were on hand, but he mentioned that this spring, staff will begin foraging in the area, and they plan on brewing with what they collect. I ordered instead a tasting flight that consisted of a sour, a cream ale, and two Northeastern-style IPAs. Each impressed me, offering a flavor profile more complex and engrossing than what I usually find in brewpubs. The Artist had a Coconut Russian Imperial Stout that, with an ABV of 10 percent, was appropriately named “Fur and Teeth.” She called it “quite yummy.” I tasted it, too, and yes, it was.
If you are an aficionado of craft beers, or simply want a high-quality brewed beverage to linger over, The Good Wolf is definitely worth visiting. It’s at 10990 Industrial Way in Truckee (suite B103), and is open from 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Friday, noon to 10 p.m. Saturday, and noon to 8:00 p.m. Sunday. It’s closed Monday. Website: www.thegoodwolfbrewing.com.
Next time we’re bringing friends.
— Richard Anderson
