Roasted Tomato Yaki Udon

Yaki Udon is a simple Japanese dish of fried udon noodles--those wide Japanese noodles that resemble linguine--usually served with a mixture of meat and vegetables. I thought it could be interesting to develop a version of Yaki Udon that uses tomatoes.

By now, a lot of you have probably heard of the so-called "fifth taste," umami. The term is Japanese and mean roughly "savory." Lots of Japanese dishes are loaded with umami flavor, which comes from foods high in glutamates like mushrooms, seaweed and certain types of fish. Dashi, for example, is a Japanese broth made from dried kombu seaweed and dried fish flakes known as bonito or katsuobushi. Dashi doesn't taste like much by itself, but the glutamate-rich broth is used to enhance the flavor of other ingredients (I've used it to poach salmon, for example).

Tomatoes, although not something we commonly associate with Japanese food, are also loaded with glutamates. This isn't so apparent with raw tomatoes, but when roasted, those savory notes really come through. I thought it would be interesting to make Yaki Udon using a roasted tomato sauce. A sort of "Japanese Spaghetti" if you will.

I roasted and pureed fresh tomatoes for this dish and then made a sauce with onions, scallions, garlic and shiitake mushrooms. Although spaghetti is commonly garnished with grated parmesan, I used black sesame seeds. Although it takes awhile to roast the tomatoes, this can be done ahead of time. Otherwise, the dish comes together quite quickly.

Roasted Tomato Yaki Udon

3 lb. ripe red tomatoes, cut into 1 to 2 inch chunks
4 tbsp. vegetable oil, divided
1/2 tsp. sea salt
10 oz. package dried udon noodles
1/2 yellow onion, diced
4-5 scallions chopped, white and light green parts separated from the green part
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 oz. shiitake mushrooms, stems removed and caps sliced into 1/4-inch slices
2 tbsp. low-sodium tamari (may use soy sauce)
1 tbsp. mirin
1 tbsp. toasted sesame oil
2-3 tbsp. black sesame seeds

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine tomatoes, 2 tbsp. vegetable oil and sea salt in a large bowl and toss to combine. Spread the tomatoes in an even layer in a 9 X 13 baking dish. Roast the tomatoes, stirring every 30 minutes, until the tomatoes have shriveled, browned a little around the edges and significantly reduced in volume, about 3 to 3 1/2 hours. Set aside to cool. Transfer tomatoes and any remaining juices to a food processor and pulse 5 to 6 times to make a chunky sauce. Store sauce in the refrigerator until ready to use.

2. Bring a large pot of water to boil. Add the udon noodles and cook until the noodles are al dente, about 4-6 minutes (may vary by noodle brand, consult package directions). Drain noodles and set aside.

3. Heat remaining 2 tbsp. of oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add onion and sauté until softened, about 2 minutes. Add the white and light green chopped scallions and the garlic and cook for about 1 minute, stirring frequently. Add the mushrooms and sauté until tender and their water has evaporated, about 4 minutes.

4. Add the noodles to the stir fry and stir to combine. Add the soy sauce and mirin (the liquid will help break up the noodles if they are sticking together). Stir to combine the noodles with the other ingredients and cook about 1-2 minutes. Add the roasted tomato sauce and the sesame oil, reduce heat to medium-low and cook just enough to reheat the tomatoes, 1-2 minutes. Add the sesame oil and chopped scallion greens and stir to combine.

5. Serve the noodles in bowls topped with a sprinkle of black sesame seeds.

Related

Dashi-Poached Salmon

Bacon Barley Kale Corn Mushroom Soup

This soup is kind of a mutt, but I love it anyway (mutts tend to be lovable, don't they?). In making it, I thought a little bit about corn chowder and tom kha tai soup, although the resulting product doesn't really resemble either. It's a nice blend of earthy and fresh flavors, well suited for these waning days of spring and summer starts to really hit.

Besides bringing together all these great flavors, I wanted a soup that would be a good vehicle for chervil from my herb garden. Chervil looks a lot like parsley, and I've read they are related, although I think chervil has a pretty different flavor--more floral and less sharp than parsley. Lacking chervil, which I've never been able to find in a grocery store or farmer's market (hence my desire to try growing it), you could substitute fresh parsley.

Fresh chervil.

Bacon Barley Kale Corn Mushroom Soup

1/2 pearled barley
6 oz. hickory-smoked bacon, cut into 1/4-inch strips (lardons)
1 sweet onion, diced
2 carrots, peeled and diced
3 garlic cloves, smashed
8 oz. cremini mushrooms, stemmed and quartered
1 bunch of kale, stemmed and cut into 2-inch pieces
8 cups low-sodium chicken broth
2 tsp. dried thyme
1 dried bay leaf
2 cups fresh or frozen sweet corn kernels
1 tsp. arrowroot powder
1/4 cup white balsamic vinegar (may substitute apple cider vinegar or white wine vinegar, but not dark balsamic vinegar)
3/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup chopped fresh chervil (may substitute parsley or other leafy green herb)

1. Bring 1 1/2 cups water to boil in a medium saucepan. Add barley, cover and reduce heat to simmer for 40 minutes. Remove lid and set aside.

2. Heat a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add bacon and cook until crisped. Remove bacon from pot with a slotted spoon and set aside. Remove any bacon fat from the pot in excess of about 2 tablespoons. Add the onion, carrots and garlic and cook until softened, about 10 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook until browned, about 5-7 minutes. Add the kale and cook about 2-3 minutes until it begins to wilt. Add the chicken broth, thyme and bay leaf and increase heat to medium-high to bring to a boil. Add the corn, cooked bacon and cooked barley and reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 10-15 minutes. Turn off the heat.

3. Mix arrowroot powder with 1 tbsp. water to create a slurry then stir into the pot. Add the vinegar and cream and stir to combine. Serve in bowls topped with a sprinkle of fresh chervil.

Fresh Take on Green Bean Casserole

Fans of classic green bean casserole look away now. You're not going to like what I have to say about the drab, sodium-laden dish that graces far too many Thanksgiving tables every year.

I think the idea of cooking green beans with mushrooms and onions to produce a mixture of soft and crisp textures is wonderful. I just don't think the way most people do it--i.e. with canned cream of mushroom soup, canned green beans and canned fried onions (remarkable that you can get this canned) is the way to go.

With this recipe, I sought to reinvent classic green bean casserole with fresh ingredients and lots of flavor, while being true to the original recipe's principal ingredients: mushrooms, onions and, of course, green beans. I also made the recipe with no cans, everything is fresh, which improves the nutritional profile of dish considerably, especially the sodium, even though I made it with added bacon and cheese (more on that later).

Instead of cream of mushroom soup, I used mushrooms, specifically creminis, which I sautéed. I also used fresh green beans instead of canned (or frozen), which provide a brighter color and better texture. Substituting sautéed onions for the fried onions does mean a loss of crispiness. To compensate, I added a finishing coating of toasted panko. Additional flavor boosts came from the hickory-smoked bacon and the gruyere cheese, which I melted into a béchamel sauce, not too dissimilar from how you make a mornay cheese sauce for mac & cheese. A little white wine and a dash of nutmeg give the sauce a refined flavor.

Amazingly, despite being made with bacon and cheese, my dish has less than half the sodium content of the traditional version made with canned ingredients. Using a recipe calculator, I estimated that the Campbell's recipe if made with regular cream of mushroom soup, Green Giant brand canned green beans and French's french-fried onions, contains about 6,016 mg of sodium, or 1,003 grams per serving. Given that the recommended daily allowance is 2,300 mg for a healthy person, you're looking at nearly half of your daily sodium intake for a single serving. If you're on a low-sodium diet of 1,500 mg max, it's two-thirds of your daily intake.

In contrast, my dish has about 2,400 grams, or about 400 grams per serving. While I wouldn't describe that as "low salt," it's less than half the sodium content of the version made with canned ingredients. Obviously, there's still a good number of calories here, 274 per serving, to be specific.

Green Bean Casserole with Bacon and Mushrooms

1/2 lb. hickory-smoked bacon, cut into 1/4-inch strips
1 sweet onion, diced
Seasoned salt, to taste
8 oz. cremini mushrooms, stems removed and caps thinly sliced
2 lb. green beans, trimmed and cut into 1 1/4-inch pieces
3 tbsp. plus 2 tsp. unsalted butter
3 tbsp. unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup dry white wine (I used sauvignon blanc)
1 cup milk (skim is fine)
Dash of ground nutmeg
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Pinch of cayenne pepper
4 oz. gruyere cheese, shredded
1/2 cup panko crumbs

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.

2. Heat a medium frying pan over medium heat. Add bacon and cook until browned and its fat has rendered. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon. Remove bacon fat in excess of 1 tablespoon (reserve the bacon fat). Add onion, season with salt and cook until softened. Remove from pan. Add a tablespoon of reserved bacon fat back to the pan. Sauté the sliced mushrooms until browned. Remove from pan and set aside in a large bowl with the cooked bacon and onion.

3. Meanwhile, bring a medium saucepan of water to boil. Add the green beans and cook for 3 minutes. Remove the beans transfer to to an ice water bath. When cooled, add to the bowl with the bacon, onion and mushrooms.

4. In a large frying pan, melt butter over medium heat and add flour. Cook, whisking constantly, until lightly browned. Add white wine and whisk to combine. Add milk, season with nutmeg, salt, freshly ground black pepper and cayenne pepper and cook, whisking constantly, until thickened. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the shredded gruyere cheese and stir with a whisk until melted and combined.

5. While the sauce cooks, heat remaining 2 tsp. butter in a small frying pan over medium-low heat. Add panko, stir to coat with butter and toast lightly on low heat until (do not brown the crumbs).

6. Pour the cheese sauce over the cooked beans, bacon, onion and mushrooms and stir to combine. Transfer to a 9 x 13 baking dish. Spread the toasted panko evenly on top. Bake until heated through and the mixture bubbles a bit, about 20 minutes. If the panko topping isn't browned, heat the oven broiler and broil the casserole for about 30-45 seconds until lightly browned (watch carefully to prevent burning).

Toasted Fazzoletti with Mushrooms and Hazelnuts

Today is the Day of the Mushroom, an apt time for this food holiday to come along when mushroom fanatics are busy foraging for all sorts of unusual varieties of fungi.

Originally, I had planned to celebrate this day with Funghi Calabresi from the Mario Batali Cooks mobile app. But the recipe was so poorly written that I was not entirely sure what I was doing was correct. The results were fine, but not Day of the Mushroom-worthy.

Shoot for "honey-colored" when roasting the pasta flour.

Thankfully, the April issue of Food & Wine has a great recipe to showcase mushrooms: Toasted Fazzoletti with Chanterelles and Hazelnuts. The toasted pasta flour and nuts complement the mushrooms' earthiness. And Fazzoletti is one of the easiest pastas to make at home, since it requires no precision cutting.

You may cut the fazzoletti precisely, but I prefer irregular shapes.

The homemade fazzoletti takes some time to make due to several steps of resting time for the dough, so be sure to plan ahead to allocate enough time. The dough recipe was a little challenging, but not insurmountable. Be sure to watch the flour while it roasts, since it could burn. I removed mine from the oven a little earlier than the recipe called for, since I was concerned it could smoke.

Don't leave the cooked fazzoletti in a bowl too long before adding to the sauce, as they will stick together.

Another challenge with the dough was getting the consistency right. When it came time to roll it out in a pasta machine, it was really sticky. As I kneaded the dough, I added a generous amount of additional flour. After it seemed the pasta flour alone wasn't going to produce a smooth enough dough, I added all-purpose flour, which made the dough a little softer and thus easier to work with.

As I mentioned earlier, fazzoletti are easier to deal with than say linguine or fettuccine, in part because you can just cut the dough into random squares. The recipe called for making 2-inch squares, but rather than discard a lot of little pieces, I made mine more irregular. In the final dish, when the pasta ends up folded into random shapes anyway, it doesn't matter how perfect they are. In fact, I rather like the more rustic look of their irregularity. Be sure not to cook the noodles ahead of time, since they will stick together (prying apart hot noodles is a pain--speaking from experience here).

Although chanterelles were used in the original recipe, I made it with more common cremini mushrooms.

Mushroom aficionados will want to use the chanterelles as called for in the recipe or another interesting mushroom. Unfortunately, Whole Foods stopped their unusual mushroom promotion the weekend I was buying ingredients for this dish, so I had to settle for cremini mushrooms, which were still quite delicious.

Toasted Fazzoletti with Mushrooms and Hazelnuts
Adapted from Toasted Fazzoletti with Chanterelles and Hazelnuts, Food & Wine, April 2013


1/2 cup hazelnuts
6 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 lb. mushrooms, such as chanterelle or cremini, thickly sliced
Salt
Fresh-ground black pepper
1 large shallot, minced
1 tbsp. chopped thyme
Pinch of crushed red pepper flakes
2 tbsp. sherry vinegar
1 cup low-sodium chicken stock
3/4 lb. fresh toasted fazzoletti pasta (see recipe below)
1/4 cup snipped chives


1. Preheat the oven to 375 F. Spread the hazelnuts in a pie plate or on a baking sheet and toast for 12 minutes, until the skins split and the nuts are fragrant. Allow the nuts to cool a bit, then transfer the nuts to a clean kitchen towel, fold the towel the nuts and rub the nuts vigorously between the two layers of towel to remove the skins. Coarsely chop the nuts, if desired (I left mine whole).

2. In a large, deep skillet, cook 4 tbsp. of the unsalted butter over moderate heat until lightly browned, about 3 minutes. Add the mushrooms, season with salt and pepper and cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until all of the liquid has evaporated and the mushrooms are golden, about 8 minutes. Add the shallot, thyme and crushed red pepper and cook over moderately high heat for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the vinegar and cook until evaporated, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the skillet. Add the stock and simmer until reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

In a large pot of salted boiling water, cook the fazzoletti until al dente, about 3 minutes (I recommend cooking them in two batches to avoid crowding the pot). Drain and add the pasta to the skillet, along with the remaining 2 tbsp. of butter. Cook over moderate heat, stirring, until the pasta is coated with butter. Stir in the chives and serve in shallow bowls, garnishing with the toasted hazelnuts.



Fresh Toasted Fazzoletti
Adapted from Food & Wine, April 2013


3 cups durum wheat flour (or pasta flour), plus more for dusting (I used about a cup of all-purpose flour)
5 large eggs
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp. kosher salt


1. Preheat the oven to 375 F. Spread 1 cup of the flour on a baking sheet and toast for about 30 minutes, stirring once, until fragrant and honey-colored (I pulled mine a little sooner, about 25 minutes total). Let the flour cool.

2. In a food processor, combine the toasted flour with the remaining 2 cups of flour and pulse. With the machine on, add the eggs, milk and salt and blend until the dough comes together; turn out onto a floured work surface and knead 2 or 3 times to form a soft, supple dough. Wrap the dough in plastic and let stand at room temperature for 2 hours.

3. Cut the dough into smaller pieces (judge this based on your pasta machine; the original recipe said 4 pieces, but I did 8, since that worked better in my pasta machine). Using a pasta machine on the thickest setting, run 1 piece of dough through the machine, dusting with flour. Fold the dough in thirds and run it through the machine at the same setting. Continue to run the dough on successively thinner settings until you are 1 setting from the thinnest (I made the dough a little thicker than this--setting 4 on a Kitchen Aid pasta machine). Dust the dough with flour and drape over a floured work surface while you repeat with the remaining dough. Cut the pasta into 2-inch squares and dust lightly with flour. Let the squares stand at room temperature for 1 hour, tossing occasionally.