konyhatündér

If you never revisit restaurants that you have caught serving you limp carrots straight from the microwave or a rage-stirring “Mexican mix” of carrots, corn and green peas and green beans, you are absolutely right. But don’t hate the freezer for it. The freezer is your friend.

It is sometimes a dangerous friend, to be sure. Large ice crystals can puncture cell walls in your food and cause odd chemical reactions because they concentrate the stuff that is usually dissolved in water, leaving rancid flavors, browned skins. Also, he is a friend that not all of your other friends will like (see table below). It is not perfect.

But, oh how accommodating and understanding he can be.

If you have a nice juicy bit of bone or some skin that you have picked off an unsuspecting chicken breast that you would have thrown away, you can just collect it in the freezer until you have enough to make a good consommé. If you make a batch of polenta for grilling (which takes 45 minutes), you can just let it set, cut it up, and freeze it until you need it, and have grilled polenta in 5. The same goes for a pate brisée or a pie crust dough. You will never run out of toast bread or croissants or fresh rolls warm out of the oven.

And then there is the stuff that you are bored with now, but will be really happy to have in a couple of weeks. Half of a shockingly sweet dried-plum studded chocolate fruitcake. That Moroccan meat tagine that you made too much of. Cookies that you don’t have to consume in one sitting. A chicken leg left from a grilled chicken. That meat stock that you made from the bits in the freezer and the carcass of the grilled chicken, which you will now be able to use instead of chicken stock cubes for a quick creamed soup.

You can also use him to improve some of your dishes. Even the best restaurants freeze chocolate soufflés before baking to achieve that lovely runny center of hot chocolate heaven. Frozen chili con carne is even better than fresh. Freezing is also used to distill alcohol while keeping more of the fruit’s original taste than the usual cooking process, or curing meat.

You can freeze leftovers, half-prepared ingredients, sauces, eggs, meat cuts, pasta, home-made TV-dinners, in other words, almost everything – with the proper technique.

There are actually very few tricks you need to know. Always freeze as fast as you can to avoid the formation of large crystals that are more likely to puncture cell walls and leech away the tasty stuff. Freeze without any covering, on a plate, then put into plastic bags or containers (unless the stuff is liquid, of course) or wrap in clingfoil. Blanch vegetables before freezing. Defrost in a bath of cold water, if possible, hot water, if not, and use the microwave oven only as the last resort. Think of how you will use what you freeze and form batches accordingly. And always, always use up the frozen stuff as fast as you can.

So if you just keep his boundaries in mind, trust him with your secrets, and make some compromises and take the bad with the good, your friendship with the big cold guy in the kitchen will bring you much culinary joy and comfort. Just like human-human friendships.

6 things no-one should ever freeze

• mayonnaise and other fat-based emulsions such as hollandaise
• potatoes they turn into a pasty mush, yuck
• cream it separates into buttery clumps of fat, unless frozen whipped
• salad greens anything you eat raw or lightly steamed loses all crunchiness
• fruits usually turn into a pulp in home freezers, so only freeze them if you will cook or bake them anyway.
•  

• risotto rice

For the foodie of the 20th century, the end always justifies the means. If that duck needs to be force-fed to make its liver swell up with tasty fat, so be it (poor duck). If a kilogram of steak takes 25,000 liters of water to “make”, just add it to the bill and trust the market to make people buy less of it (of course, we will continue to pay ridiculously large sums for a filet mignon). As to pork, well, we just close our eyes, chew and try not to think of Babe. And corn (which is basically distilled oil from a farmer’s point of view due to the heavy fertilizing it needs), is our very favorite vegetable, even if most of don’t know about it. It is used for, and in, almost everything including pop soda, hamburger buns and in meat, too, via feed.

But for the next generation, things will probably be different. In fact, they will have to be different, for at least two reasons.

Some more Earth, anyone?

One, there is simply not enough planet. Even if population growth continues to slow in billion-people countries such as China and India due to economic development, humanity is projected to reach 9.5-10 billion people by 2050, almost 40% more than today’s population. We will need more food, a lot more.

According to some calculations, today’s farmlands would add up to a landmass the size of South America. For the world to be able to feed us our diet of plants in 2050 using our current technologies, we would need to find new arable land the size of Brazil. As for meat, well, the UN estimates that our take-up of meat will rise by about 70% by 2050. The bad news is that we would not be able do this even if we turned all of our farmland into pastures.

Two, feeding us adds is killing us through climate change, too. A quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions derive from agriculture, land use and biomass burning. Meanwhile, the changing climate could easily decrease yields because of the bad weather it causes (more CO2, by itself, can increase yields). If lifestock had to be increased, greenhouse gas emissions would be much much higher, as currently 18% of all emissions is connected to making meat for hungry humans.

So things are bound to change, as they have in the past when similar worries of overpopulation were resolved, usually by technological advances. So what could constitute such advances? And, most importantly, how will it change the taste of our food?

Yielding to GMOs

Precisely what we eat is sure to change. Farming yields will increase as billions of dollars flow into R&D. New genetically engineered plants will be born and patented: some resistant to pests or herbicides used to get rid of weeds, others taking water-shortage extremely well. While there is a lot of debate about whether current GMOs are safe or effective, this new technology will surely take the usual path for radically new technologies. We will be frightened of food genetically stiched together from other organisms, the way 19th century railroaders were (also justly) frightened of big steam-engines that initially sometimes went caboom. Similarly, there are sure to be GMO-fiascos where unexpected side-effects cause griveous harm to persons or the ecosystem. But sooner or later, the details of the technology will be ironed out, and it will become mainstream. After all, it is to agriculture what engines were to mobility.

Let’s just hope that the plants’ taste does not suffer like it did with the globalization of fruit trade, where fruits are picked green and stuck into ethanol gas to “ripen”, a process where the end-result might look very similar to a sun-ripened fruit, but the taste is merely a shade of what it would be, had it been left on the tree to convert sunlight into various sugars and tasty molecules.

Growing in cities

This is incidentally another thing that might change, should a very interesting idea called vertical farming gain traction. Vertical farming, an idea propagated by Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University who would take farming back inside the cities. He envisions huge skyscrapers of what are basically plant production plants where cereals and vegetables are grown in controlled environments. And of course, if the environment is controlled, you can grow anything the market wants, be it cucumbers, wheat, seaweed or bananas. Light, temperature, nutrients would all be modulated with scientific precision in hydroponic or aeroponic environments.

The latter basically means that plants are not planted in soil at all, but grow in a nutrient-filled steam and soak up everything they need from it. Hydroponics, which is a lot less scary, is now an 80-year old technology, and it already in use as a large-scale technology in for example at the 318-acre Eurofresh Farms in Arizona. Plants are basically held in place and nutrient-filled water is circulated over their roots.

„Crops can be produced year-round, droughts and floods that often ruin entire harvests avoided, yields are maximized because of ideal growing and ripening conditions and human pathogens are minimized,” Despommier writes in a recent article.

He argues that vertical farming would not just provide enough – and local, and perfectly ripe, and high-quality, and varied – food, it would also help out in the green department by cutting transport emissions and freeing up farmland for reforestation.

Chicago might be the first city to build such a farm, as detailed plans for it are being crafted now by the University of Illinois, but several metropolises from all over the world have shown interest

Common wisdom says one such ideal pairing is food and wine. Not all foods and all wines, of course. As any foodie will tell you, red wines and seafood don’t mix, while delicate whites are easily overpowered by a medium rare steak. And a good sliver of camembert will usually smooth out any cabernet. But beyond the obvious no-nos, most sommeliers see food-wine pairing as more of an art than a science, with no hard and fast rules.

Do they have chemistry?

Well, no longer. It seems science is pushing itself to the front again. (Diluted wine with meals originally served a sanitary purpose: to disinfect meat gone slightly bad from a lack of refrigeration.) Japanese scientists have in October published results explaining why some red wines do work with seafood: if a red does not have iron in it, then the fishy aftertaste of a bad bordeax-bream pairing can be avoided. If even trace amounts are added to any wine while dining on scallops, voilá, a terrible meal.

It also turns out that combining red wines and red meat is not only good, but also good for you. Red wines containg polyphenols, powerful antioxidants that are not absorbed by the body easily. Meanwhile, the digestion of fat-rich red meat produces two byproducts (malondialdehyde and hydroperoxide) which are toxic to cells. However, when you have both in your stomach, it acts as a bioreactor where polyphenols are not only capable of binding free radicals but killing toxic stuff as well, american scientists found.

And it is not just the scientists, but chefs as well. Enlisting scientific methods and chemistry labs in the search for perfect flavor-combinations has been around for a while. Molecular gastronomists like Ferran Adrià of El Bulli in Spain and others analyse the flavor compounds of food and use the results to mix them in surprising combinations based on the two foods sharing a flavor-compound. Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal of the British restaurant Fat Duck discovered, for example, that white chocolate and caviar have a compound in common: trimethylamine. Carrot and violet should go because both have ionone. Oyster and kiwi share methyl hexanoate. Coffee might make a good substitute for broth as it also has 2-furfurylthiol and 2-methyl-3-furanethiol. Liven and jasmine, yum.

The science of drinking

But this year, the search for perfect matches is encreasingly including beverages. Heston Blumenthal is researching how the drink of British grandmothers, sherry complements foods. Together with Professor Don Mottram of Reading University, he found that dry sherries hold a group of compounds known as diketopiperazines (DKPs) that can accentuate and carry the taste of some umami-rich foods such as shitake mushrooms and Parmesan cheese. (Umami is the fifth taste beside sweet, sour, salty and bitter. It is also known as savoury.) For instance, eugenol was found in both Fino Sherry and cloves, making them a match. “One of the big revelations was trying an Amontillado with peach and it seemed to be that the Sherry made the peach more peach-like, which is amazing,” Blumenthal commented to a journalist.

A Canadian sommelier of 20 years is quickly reaching superstar status in the molecular gastronomy world due to his scientific investigation of wine-food pairings. His book Papilles et molécules (Tastebuds and Molecules), published in the summer, received heady accolade from Adrià himself (who has, incidentally introduced a beer to go with food). Adrià praised it as “a paramount work, the foundation stone, the first step into a new world that is now open wide in all its splendour to those who love gastronomy.” François Chartier also mostly uses similarity as the basis for pairings, leading to combinations such as oak-aged wines with pork, traditionally linked up with fruity reds and rosemary with moscato, riesling and gewurztraminer, which are seldom paired at all.

One food-wine pairing I liked in Budapest was Philippe of Philippe Le Belge Restaurant and Sára Matolcsy, head of Etyeki Kúria Winery. It was a combination of known factors: the former is one of the more innovative French restaurants in Budapest, while the latter happens to be my favourite winery in Hungary. The menu had six wines to go with eight dishes with interesting combinations such as Chinese prawns in beer-batter with a pinot noir osé. Auvergne blue cheese, which usually takes a sticky-sweet red such as a port or a madeira was paired with a chardonnay, which made me happy.

Mass hunger was banished from Hungary only in the middle of the last century. Until then, a bad harvest could kill hundreds and thousands in the less developed parts of the country – southeast, in the Alföld and northeast in tiny mountain villages. In fact, abolishing mass hunger was one of the true achievements of communism – per capita GDP rose in the burst of quick growth spurred by rebirth of international trade behind the Iron Curtain and this gain was, to a never before seen extent, truly redistributed in the end of the 50s, beginning of the 60s.

And amid all this shiny new hope and uncharacteristic optimism, Hungarian comfort food was born. It wasn’t fancy stuff. It was, after all, adapted to life in a partly industrialized agrarian society. And physical work requires a vast amount of calories that are the easiest to deliver with a plateload of potatoes with a huge dollop of fat, preferably lard and/or sour cream. It also followed the logic of human biology – with carbs to make you happy and some fat to make it taste good. 

Simple, hearty fare was also an ideological issue – anything out of line with traditional farmers’ fare was considered bourgeois affectation. (This of course, did not extend party leaders here and abroad, which is easy to discern in view of the fact that whole generations of cows were born, chopped up and sold without any filet mignon reaching the markets.)

In the industrialized cuisine of socialist era, niche vegetables previously widespread in gardens such as artichokes, rhubarb and chard disappeared altogether. Vegetable farming was limited to these: potatoes, tomatoes, paprika, cauliflower, kohlrabi (German turnip or karalábé), carrots and parsley root, tree types of cabbage (red, Savoy and Bulgarian), onions and garlic.

So I always wonder that so many dishes were compiled of so few ingredients. Paprikás krumpli, which was originally shepherds’ food and cooked in a cauldron, starts out with a chunk of diced bacon, some sautéed onions, some kolbász, preferably of the lángolt type to give it some protein, a spoonful of the omnipresent paprika, some water, and potatoes to give it bulk.

Krumplis tészta, the perfect meal for lonely people without much patience for cooking (shepherds, again), is pasta squares with paprika, cooked potatoes, pepper, and bacon.

Túrós csusza is even easier: just cook the pasta squares, and sprinkle cottage cheese, sour cream and fried bacon bits on top. (There are ways to make this more complicated, and taste even better, though. E.g. coating the pasta with the fat from the bacon and sticking it all in the oven to make it crackle a bit.) This however, is special in the sense that this is the only Hungarian home-cooked comfort food that makes it onto restaurant menus, so it is the simplest to try.

Tojásos galuska, where home-made pasta with an overdose of eggs is cooked, drained, then mixed in with some yes, you guessed it, dices of fried bacon and eggs. This dish is always accompanied by some salad lettuce sunk in vinegary-sugary water.

My personal favorite is a slightly more complicated dish called rakott krumpli, which is in fact a bucolically bastardized version of a gratin dauphinoise.

The latter is an elegantly minimalist concoction of paper-thin potatoes, rich cream and garlic. However, the inventors of rakott krumpli obviously felt it that it was lacking in some respects. First of all, who wants to bother with grating potatoes, lets just cook them in their skins, making it easy to peel them when they cool a bit. And no potato slices should be less than half a centimeter thick, it wouldn’t fill you up if it was. You definitely need some protein, maybe preserved meat and eggs in it, and a touch of paprika, hm, let’s slice in some kolbász as well. And let’s use some 20-30% fat sour cream instead of crème fraîche, it’s cheaper and easier to keep. Maybe some bacon? Slice it all up and shove it in an oven, bake it at high heat and voila, now that is what a potato dish should be like! None of your dainty airs now!

And truly, made well, the potatoes become creamy from all the fat, the kolbász adds a complicated but familiar “Hungarian” taste and the eggs soak it all up and add a variation of texture without making it all heavy. So if you are ever invited to dinner by a Hungarian family, beg them to eat the fois gras without you and just make you some authentic rakott krumpli with pickles cucumbers (csemegeuborka).

Lillies look pretty, smell nice, and are much more complicated beings than you or me, if the amount of DNA we have is any indication. As a matter of fact, the genome of lilies is ten times that of humans. A tenth of the tiger lily’s natural blueprint is enough to describe  a being capable of building the Eiffel tower and going to the Moon. And what can the lily do? Well, as I said before – look pretty and smell nice. All that DNA to detail how it should do that...

Which is why I think that experiencing that complexity, i.e. eating (the edible species of) lilies is definitely a culinary adventure worth taking, especially as tiger lilies are only one of several hundred edible flowers – many of which are traditional fixtures in the kitchen. Lavender and chamomile are known to be excellent with red meat dishes, while jasmine and rose petals are traditional dessert flavors in many cuisines. (Turkish delights, anyone?) Saffron and nutmeg flowers are used in basic Mediterranean food such as béchamel sauce. Several flowers’ heads are disguised in supermarkets as vegetables – artichokes, broccoli, cauliflowers, to name a few, although young sunflowers are also said to be great steamed. Most of the flowers of well-known herbs such as basil or rosemary contain all of the essential oils of the leaves but remain a bit more delicate in taste, ideal for salads. Courgette flowers have been stuffed in Italy since, well, since courgettes were called zucchinis.

However, until this new rage for food broke out in the past couple of decades, the use of flowers in food was pretty much limited to the above despite some interest on behalf of consumers. In fact, in a 1966 Michigan study, Garden day participants and professional chefs were asked to rate violas, borage flowers and nasturtiums on whether they found them appealing or not as food – astonishingly, chefs were less likely to find them exciting than potential consumers.

All that has changed though, with many top-notch chefs experimenting with all sort of flowers. The renown Catalan restaurant El Bulli served tangerine flower concentrate and rose foam, while flowers are also used as a sort of palate cleanser between bites of for example, oysters. The experimental kitchen of Mugaritz serves bonito from the Bay of Biscay over sea chamomile and coastal herbs. In fact, the art of serving flowers is now almost mainstream, with several good thematic cookbooks and guides.

Fortunately, Budapest is also capable of satisfying your craving for acacia or marigold with a three-month old bistro even taking flower-cuisine for its name. Flores Bistro on the Belgrád rakpart on the Pest bank of the Danube is quickly establishing itself as the provider of one of the best value meals in town that will suit the gourmet without bankrupting him or her, right up there with Csalogány 26, Olimpia and Klassz. Flores’ speciality, as its name indicates, are flowers and herbs, with signature dishes such as the lavender pork chops with parsley-root purée and grilled peaches (lovely) and the duck liver pâté with lilac foam. As the owner who sometimes puts on the chef’s hat will tell you, spices are used sparingly, because the flavors of the ingredients and creativity in combining them are expected to fill in for borrowed piquancy.

If you take a good long look at it, what you are getting is usually 80% air. And the rest is very basic stuff as well: water, flour, maybe a tad of sugar and a peck of salt, and that’s it. So it sort of staggers my mind that these very basic ingredients can form pitas, chapatis (Indian flatbread), bannocks, (Scottish oat cakes), shaobings (parchment thin Chinese wrappers), lavash (yummy Armenian bread), pretzels, pizza dough, baladi (Egyptian “pocket bread”), bagels and pumpernickel (rye bread), baguettes and mantou (Chinese steamed bread), all so very distinguishable from each other.

Especially since what happens inside the bread is always basically the same: the gigantic proteins in the flour are encouraged to sort themselves out by introducing air bubbles to break the protein strands into more manageable bits and kneading to align them. Then these bubbles are enlarged by the introduction of gases usually produced by a fungus (baker’s yeast or simply collecting the yeast that float around in the air by presenting an attractive watery-floury foodbowl for them, also known as a leaven). Eventually heat is used to get rid of the water that makes all this molecular stretching and sliding around possible, firming the bread, and there you have it, you have a tortilla, a kifli or a biscotti.

Yet maybe it is precisely this sparsity of ingredients that allows kitchen chemistry to be its most inventive: take two or maybe three ingredients and see what you can do with it.

So why don’t you try it? Waking up to the smell of baking bread wafting is something no-one should miss out on.

And if concocting your own experiment is not your thing, you can have the smell without the fuss by getting some par-baked bread you just have to pop in the oven. Some commercial versions are good (try Győri Sütöde’s ciabatta), but if you want a treat, go for the organic French croissants and München brezels, available for take-away at Intercontinental.

But as I walk the trails near Királykút (King’s Spring) or on meadows close to Visegrád, I scan the undergrowth for the telltale signs of edible berries, mushrooms or clumps of wild garlic, the leaves of which happen to make a great salad if you combine them with a bit of blue cheese and some sun-dried tomatoes. (It’s a bit late for wild garlic now as they grow at the end of spring, but you might still find some high in the Alps.)

But my favorites are wild strawberries and raspberries. As small as the nail on your pinky, they are a bit difficult to discover, you have to keep an eye out for their angular leaves. But if you do manage to find them, prepare yourself for an intense burst of sunshine on your tongue that will make food industry experts who concoct “forest fruit” flavors seem the clumsy henchmen they are. Unfortunately, the berries are often amidst huge patches of nettles, but hey, you can’t have everything.

Wild strawberries adapt themselves well to all sorts of habitats with sunshine, so you can find them in meadows as well. If you do, then you just might be lucky enough to use them as indicators to pick one of the most wide-spread and delicious mushrooms in Hungary, Marasmius oreades or szegfűgomba (a.k.a. fairy ring mushrooms). They are relatively easy to recognize: they grow in circular clumps in the grass after rain. Their hats are white from both above and below and have small indentations all around. But please don’t pick any mushrooms you are not 100% certain of, and even if you are, take them to Vásárcsarnok, where mycologists will look them over for free – poisoning yourself is so stupid.

Mushrooms always pose questions of life and death. First of all, many of them eat cadavers, which is a bit disturbing (the rest, the “vegetarian” mushrooms live in peaceful symbiosis with certain plants’ roots). But if they weren’t there to break down organic material, life would have long ago run out of building blocks. So they are in fact the cleaning crew after all of us plants and animals who ultimately draw our energy from sunshine. Oh, and some mushrooms can eat petrochemicals as well, a digestive capability which only a few bacteria could rival.

Szegfűgomba has another trick up its sleeve. It can revive itself after completely drying out. This is not just rehydration, it starts to breathe again after having stopped. (It has something to do with a sugar its cells contain, but we don’t know what exactly.) How is that for weird?

But the weird goes on: they are huge, often even several kilometers wide, and decades or centuries old – yet invisible. We don’t know why, where or when the strands of mushroom, the hyphae bring forth their visible fruit, the stuff we eat. It has something to do with rain.

So don’t be surprised if you do not manage to find any after trekking in the Pilis for hours. I have the perfect consolation for your growling stomach: a home-cooked meal of Hungarian comfort food at Kis Rigó in Pilisszentlászló.