Entries from The Amateur Gourmet tagged with 'Mark Bittman'
Turkey Oysters
Mark Bittman waxes lyrical over the part of the chicken the French call "sot-l’y-laisse" (which translates to "“the part that only a fool leaves behind”) and others call "the oyster" when he finds a bag of them from a large turkey at a French market. Do you dig these out when you roast a chicken? I know I often forget about them and Craig digs them out when I'm not looking....
The No-Knead Bread
If you haven't heard about the no-knead bread by now, you clearly don't read many food blogs (or newspapers, for that matter.) Last year, in The New York Times--actually, TWO years ago in The New York Times (the article was published November 8, 2006! Boy, I'm way behind on making this)--Mark Bittman coaxed a recipe from master bread baker Jim Lahey for perfect bakery-quality bread at home. Shockingly, the recipe required no work, no kneading of any kind. The food world was astonished. Food bloggers went ga-ga. I watched them go ga-ga. And, finally, last week I decided to go ga-ga myself....
101 Foods with Mark Bittman's Initials (COMPLETE!)
After Mark Bittman's third foray into 101 lists, I thought it'd be fun to make a list of 101 foods with Mark Bittman's initials. Here we go.... **UPDATE: Thanks to the help of my brilliant readers, we have completed the list. Check it out!** 1. Meat Balls 2. Malt Balls 3. Matzoh Balls 4. Melted Brie 5. Melon Balls 6. Matzoh Brei 7. Mashed Banana 8. Mango Beef 9. Marinated Beets 10. Marinated Beef 11. Mushroom Bolognese 12. Marble (rye) Bagel 13. Melted Butter 14. Mexican Breadfruit 15. Milk-chocolate Brownie 16. Marinated Beans 17. Mung Beans 18. Maitre (d'hotel) Butter 19. Marrow Bones 20. Mont Blanc 21. Mountain Berries 22. Monkey Bread 23. Multigrain Bread 24. Marshmallow Brownies 25. Marshmallow Bunnies 26. Mrs. Butterworth's 27. Malted Beverage 28. Minced Beef 29. Mocha Beans 30. Mozzarella Bocconcini 31. Mesquite Barbecue 32. Mars Bars 33. Macerated Berries 34. Mushroom Burger 35. Mixed Bag (aka leftovers at Val's house) 36. Mint Brownies 37. Minced Buffalo 38. Mixed Bivalves 39. Mushroom Burrito 40. Mexican Burrito 41. Mashed Brains 42. Mooshu Beef 43. Mushroom Bread 44. Marmite Bread 45. Milk Bread 46. Mandel Bread 47. Matrimonial Bars 48. Macaroon Bars 49. Marzipan Bars 50. Macadamia Bars 51. Maple Biscuits 52. Maple Butter 53. Macadamia Butter 54. Mint Butter 55. Marmalade Butter 56. Malt Beer 57. Masala Beef 58. Maple Biscotti 59. Meaty Borscht 60. Mashed Beans 61. Mandarin Beef 62. Minced Beets 63. Marinated Bruschetta 64. Margarita Balls 65. Mexican Beans 66. Marinated Broccoli 67. Mushroom Bisque 68. Monkfish Bisque 69. Margarine Blend 70. Multi-grain Bagels 71. Miller Beer 72. Macaroni Bake 73. Marie's Blue (cheese salad dressing) 74. Maytag Blue 75. Mini Bagels 76. Melted Bark 77. Milk Bones (for the pups) 78. Mushroom Beignet 79. Marbled Beef 80. Meunster Blintz 81. Maple Bacon 82. Mozzarella Balls 83. Marisco's Burrito 84. Mushroom Brioche 85. Mocha Bars 86. Mongolian Barbecue 87. Malted Barley 88. Macerated Brambles 89. Mango Bellini 90. Mashed Banana 91. Millet Breat 92. Marion Berries 93. Magic Bars 94. Macadamia Brownies 95. Marble Bundt (cake) 96. Minted Berries 97. Melon Bread 98. Meat Bread 99. Mango Butter 100. Mango Beer 101. Mmmmm Bacon (thanks Anna) Thanks for all the help everyone! Some are stretches, but it's the spirit of the thing that counts....
Braised Duck Legs For Idiots
The dish you see above is a dish from a four-star chef and yet it's among the easiest you will ever prepare. It comes from Jean-George's "Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef" which was co-written by Mark Bittman. As many of you know, Mr. Bittman is The Minimalist and it might seem strange, at first, that a man who prides himself on simplicity would co-author a book with a chef renowned for his complexity, innovation and flair. But this recipe proves that two opposing forces, working together, can generate electricity: it's astonishingly good and amazingly easy. Click ahead and behold the splendor of Jean-George's Braised Duck and Vegetables with Asian Spices....
Food TV'S Unsung Hero: Mark Bittman
I am not a minimalist: my desk, like my life, overflows with clutter; I like big, loud, campy entertainment; at MoMA I roll my eyes at "White on White" and bow down before Dali, Kandinsky and Magritte (and not just because I like apples.) You'd think that if presented with a TV show by a man known as "The Minimalist" I'd recoil in horror. I like food that is big, brash and bold; I like abundance--the more ingredients the better; how could I ever like Mark Bittman and believe in what he does? Well after tonight's episode of "The Best Food in the World" on PBS, I'm ready to put him on a pedestal. In one single episode--approximately 26 minutes of television (there's a chunk of advertising before and after)--Bittman, aided with Google Earth (or was it Google Maps?), grazed with cows on Bill Niman's ranch, talked to the man himself, shot over to Tuscany where he ogled Tuscan cows with Mario Batali, met Marco the butcher who, I'm fairly confident, is the butcher profiled in Bill Buford's "Heat", had an Italian steak cook-off with Mario and then, just when you thought he couldn't do any more, he popped up in Fergus Henderson's kitchen at St. John and Henderson himself, a world class chef beloved for his fifth quarter cooking (offal: blood and guts), made his signature dish: roasted bone marrow with parsley salad. It was a stunning episode--one of the best examples of food television I've seen in a while. Bittman may be a Minimalist in the kitchen, but he's quite the opposite when it comes to his show: it's packed with hijinks and hilarity, dramatic cook-offs, food celebrities, dazzling plates of extraordinary food, and, more importantly, good old fashioned information. It leaves the large majority of cooking shows in the dust. Why is it so good? Well, let's take for example the cook-off with Mario in the hills of Tuscany. It's one thing to have a saccharine TV host in a day-glo kitchen telling you how to grill your steak, it's another thing to have two deeply intelligent cooks--one a chef, one a food writer--spatting and sparring over each and every step along the way. First of all, the steak itself made my jaw drop: it was the biggest steak I've ever seen in my life and there were two of them. (I think they were T-bones). Mario took his and rubbed it with olive oil, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, threw it on the grill and placed rosemary on the fire to give it an herbal scent. Bittman, The Minimalist, lived up to his title: he took the steak, unadorned, and threw it on the grill. "I want it to caramelize really well," he said, "and I think salt draws out moisture, so I'm going to add it at the end." "Ok," said Mario. "But you'll see with mine, it's going to get really complex flavor. You'll see at the end when we taste." There's real tension there. These guys are joshing each other, sure, but beneath the surface each one really believes in what he's doing. And then Bittman gives Batali a heart attack: he puts butter in a pan, puts the pan on the grill and adds soy sauce. "Dude!" screams Mario. "We're in Tuscany." Bittman shrugs. "It makes it taste good," he says, unwilling to be bullied. The steaks start to take on triumphant golden colors, sizzling and crackling, their aroma wafting through the screen. By the time they were done, I didn't care which one had oil, which one had butter, I wanted to eat my TV. "I use a thermometer to see if it's done," said Bittman. "Why would you use a thermometer when you have a perfectly good tool right here," said Batali, using his hand to press into the meat. "Well most of my readers wouldn't know how to do that," countered Bittman. "I've got to give them a temperature." [I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the idea.] These guys were so intent on one-upping each other I really thought the zippers would come undone and Larry Craig would pop out of the bushes with a ruler to judge. When the steaks were finished, Mario cut into them carefully. Both steaks looked stellar (if a bit underdone) but Mario's was the winner. "When you're in Tuscany," conceded Bittman, "you want to eat steak the Tuscan way." The fact that I could tell this story with so much enthusiasm speaks to the inherent quality of the show. Bittman understands that what makes something dramatic is conflict. That's what makes Top Chef so entertaining, Hell's Kitchen, and so on. The conflict partly comes from Bittman's personality--he's antagonistic--but also from the cleverly devised situations. The set-up of his other PBS show, "Bittman Takes On America's Chefs," makes those situations impeccably clear: he goes up against America's great chefs to prove that simpler can be better. And I'm often embarrassed for him--the chicken with Red Hots he made for Jean-Georges made Diana, my roommate, groan in agony--but it's part of the same winning formula. Bittman knows his food but, more importantly, he knows how to entertain. And that makes for good TV....
