Adding flavor by roasting

You know, one of the things that you hear people say about dishes they have at restaurants is that it never tastes the same way at home.

Well, it won't. There are three main reasons for that. Two are reasons that may make you reconsider dining out (but I doubt it). The third is one you have in your control.

If you were ever to watch a restaurant cook make your dinner, you would be startled, first, by how much salt goes into it. Amounts of salt that you would NEVER add to a dish at home. Then, when you watch the free hand with the olive oil, or butter, you will again say "OH MY GOD. I would NEVER do that at home." Well, if you won't, then you won't get that taste. It's as simple as that.

But the third factor that you CAN control somewhat, is heat. Restaurants cook your food at extremely high heat. Heat that you have to have patience with at home, because let's face it : your oven isn't on all day (even mine isn't). So if you have to preheat your oven to 500, and keep it there for twenty minutes before you can put your ingredients in, you just lost a good half hour, maybe more. When you're trying to rush dinner or lunch or any meal through, this is a problem.

But if you have some patience, you can get that seared/roasted flavor into things. I'm going to give you an example. This weekend, I'm serving carrot and ginger soup as a first course for our dinner party. I make extremely good carrot soup, if I do say so myself (and I do). But I wanted to try something new.

A few months ago, I had a dish of wood oven roasted carrots at one of my favorite restaurants. They were charred on the outside, and the texture had changed, to something like a sweet potato. The sugars in the carrots had come out more than in a raw carrot, and the entire effect was very pleasing and "mouth filling" if you know what I mean. I probably paid a buck a carrot for that plate, and I didn't mind one bit.

Well, I don't have a wood burning oven. But I CAN get my oven up to 550. I didn't want it that hot, so I preheated it to 425, while I went about doing other things (Here's a hint: when you KNOW you're going to use your oven, start it first, and then go about your business. It's time you'll save. Then, I took three pounds of organic carrots, and rubbed them thoroughly with olive oil. I did use a lot. Perhaps a third of a cup for all of them . (I was making three quarts of soup). Then I laid the carrots out on a baking sheet, and put them in the oven. After a while, I heard the "sizzle," meaning that they were in fact roasting. After fifteen minutes, I rolled them over, and roasted for another fifteen minutes. Then I did it one more time.

After the 45 minutes, the carrots had begun to take on a brown color in spots, and they had gone from orange to orange red. And they were soft, just like a baked potato. I let them cool so I could work with them a bit later, and prepared my soup vegetables. A cup of diced onions, and a cup of diced celery, and a good third of a cup of ginger, peeled and chopped. This is a LOT of ginger. You can use less, but I think that if you're making this much soup you'll want it. That was my "soffrito" for this soup. You'll notice that I left the carrots out of my normal soffrito. I think you can figure out why. I sauteed the celery, onions and ginger in a quarter cup of vegetable oil and while they cooked, I chopped the carrots into rough chunks. Notice that I did NOT peel them. The roasting process took care of any "nasties" on the skins, and the skins do add flavor. Since they were already soft, it didn't take much time for the carrots to get to the point where I could puree them. Maybe fifteen minutes? I cooked it in two quarts of chicken stock.

I let this cool for a while, say twenty minutes, and then pureed it. I had a v ery lovely dark orange puree, with a distinct ginger taste in the back. The carrots had in fact maintained a flavor somewhere between a sweet potato and a carrot. I would have been hard pressed to identify the vegetable, if I didn't know what it was.

This will be served today, hot, with a scoop of creme fraiche in the middle. You could serve it cold, perhaps with a swirl of peanut oil, or sesame oil, as I will do for one guest who does not want the dairy element.

Yes, it took a bit more time, but think about the "work" you did. As compared to regular soup making, all you did was rub oil over your vegetables and roast them. And you got something very different, with a very distinct flavor.

In any event, here's the menu for tonight's dinner:

We'll be finishing up my annual citrus wine with champagne, and we'll have that with veal tenderloin on toasted, homemade bread, with some black truffle puree (sort of a poor man's veal tournedos), and some provolone gougeres.

We move on to the soup I describe above, and that will be followed with

The pork roast in milk that I wrote about previously, with some oven roasted potatoes, and room temperature asparagus with a shot of meyer lemon

That will be followed by what I hope will be a great salad, with pea shoots, early lettuces and broccoli rabb flowers, in a champagne vinaigrette.

Then we'll have cheeses: five of them, all local, with comb honey and old balsamic vinegar, and some walnut bread I made last week and toasted for the plate.

finally, dessert is passion fruit souffle, which I'll make "a minute" with an orange creme anglaise to pour into the souffle, and some ginger snaps.

We'll probably skip the "frisandes" plate I usually serve at the end of the dinner, because we'll be eating so much.

Next time I write, I'll tell you how it goes.