Burning Questions: Substitutes

This whole series of "Burning Questions" posts originated as a somewhat amusing troll through the One Block West Restaurant web site server logs, to see what search phrases were bringing people to the web site. As I went through the logs, the search topics seemed to fall into several broad categories, each dealt with in a separate post in this series. This post deals with substituting one ingredient for another.

Demi-Glace Substitute. Demi-glace is highly reduced stock, so you can substitute stock for it, but you're going to have to reduce the stock to thicken it. It's probably best to make a big pot of stock one weekend and reduce it to about a fourth of its volume, then freeze it in ice cube trays. You can put the frozen cubes in a seal-top bag in the freezer and have them at your disposal at any time. No need to thaw them, just drop the frozen cubes directly into the pan. You could thicken stock with a starch such as corn, potato, or arrowroot, but you're not going to get the depth of flavor that demi-glace brings to the table.

Andouille Sausage Substitute. Andouille as we think of it here in the US is a firm sausage stuffed with chunks of pork shoulder and seasoned with a good helping of cayenne pepper. You could substitute tasso or a firm city ham such as Hormel Cure 81 and some cayenne. Tasso or ham would have the closest texture to andouille. Or you could substitute another smoked pork sausage such as kielbasa and some cayenne. Kielbasa's texture will be wrong because it is made from a ground forcemeat. Me, I'd just go to Comeaux's web site and order the real andouille. I've been buying from Ray Comeaux since the early 1990's.

Can You Substitute Clam Juice for Oyster Sauce? Not exactly. Oyster sauce is a thick soy-based sauce. Clam juice is a thin stock akin to fish fumet or fish stock. I'm not sure why you would need to substitute for oyster sauce because it seems to be stocked in most groceries. You could thicken soy sauce with a little corn starch or substitute some other kind of soy product such as bean paste.

Fish Stock Substitute. Easy. Bottled clam juice or steam some mussels and save the liquid.

Can I Use Long Grain White Rice in a Risotto? No, I wouldn't recommend substituting long-grain rice for one of the Italian short-grain rices in risotto. You're going to end up with a soggy, non-creamy mess.

Differences Between Italian Parsley and Cilantro. Visually, you can see that cilantro on the left has rounder lobes than Italian parsley on the right with its more pointed lobes. Generally, you cannot substitute one for the other: they have vastly different flavors, but you should never need to because they're both available in most grocery stores. If you are confused about them at the market, crush a leaf of each and smell them.

Replacement/Substitute for Pasilla. If I don't have pasillas in the pantry, I would use guajillos. The important thing to remember is that the pasilla is a fairly mild red chile, so you should substitute another mild red chile for it. You could use anchos, but they have a much deeper, richer, more chocolatey flavor. You might want to view my Chile Primer.

Substitute for Pimentón. Pimentón is a paprika from Spain made from peppers that have been dried over oak fires, giving the resulting product a truly smoky flavor. There is no good substitute for pimentón. You could use any paprika in a pinch, but the smoky component would be lacking.

Poblano Chile Substitute/Replacement. I use poblanos as tasty substitutes for Bell peppers in almost all cooked applications. I suppose you could go the other way and use Bell pepper, but Bell peppers are very vegetal where poblanos have a nice round chile flavor. For most applications, I would probably go with a mild green chile such as an Anaheim.

Red Yellow Onions Interchangeable. Yes they are in most applications, unless color is a factor in the dish.

Can You Use White Wine Vinegar Instead of Sherry Vinegar? Yes, but you will miss a bit of nuttiness in the sherry vinegar. Technically, sherry vinegar, like Champagne vinegar, like Chardonnay vinegar, is a white wine vinegar.

Substitute for Corvina. Corvina is a mild, white, firm fish with small flakes in the Drum family. I serve it at the restaurant in preference to the similar Grouper which is overfished. Any of the larger drums would be fine substitutes: Black Drum, Red Drum, etc. as well as all of the groupers. Striped Bass which we call Rockfish is also a great substitute.

Non-Pork Substitute for Prosciutto. For those of you who cannot eat pork, I suggest that you use a similarly cured beef called Bresaola. A similar Swiss product is called Bündnerfleisch. You may also see it labeled as beef prosciutto.

Rappahannock Cellars Wine Dinner

Last evening we hosted our latest monthly wine dinner featuring the wines of Rappahannock Cellars. John Hagarty from Rappahannock was our amiable host and introduced each of the five wines in our six-course dinner. Here's the menu:

Salpicón de Gambas; Stuffed Mussels
Seyval Blanc 2006

Tatsoi Salad with Toasted Almonds, White Raisins, and Sautéed Goat Cheese
Caramelized Onion and Curry Vinaigrette
Viognier Reserve 2006

Seared Tuna
Chickpeas, Olives, and Tapenade Vinaigrette
Claret 2005

Panisse with Grilled Mediterranean Vegetables
Baked Chickpea Cake with Grilled Red Peppers, Cipollini Onions, and Fennel
Cabernet Franc 2006

“French Onion Soup”
Croustade Topped with Braised Beef Shin, Caramelized Onions, and Local Gouda
Surrounded by French Onion Soup
Meritage 2005

Caramel Ice Cream with Chocolate-Dipped Dried Pear

I devised this menu blind, meaning that I had not tasted the wines before. I relied on the wines being typical of the grapes from which they were made and they were. I believe the pairings worked extremely well and customer feedback was very positive. Here are my pairing notes.

Salpicón de Gambas; Stuffed Mussels/Seyval Blanc 2006

Seyval as it is grown here in Virginia is a crisp white, a classic seafood wine. The two tapas that we served show the two opposite approaches to pairing wines with food. The salpicón was made from shrimp that we poached in court bouillion and marinated in a classic red wine vinaigrette augmented with parsley, minced cornichons, and minced capers. This pairing matches the acid of the vinaigrette to the acid of the wine. The mussels take the contrary approach. We minced steamed mussels and bound them with a béchamel flavored with mussel stock and pimentón. The richness of the cream-based béchamel gave the acid in the wine a backdrop against which to play.

Tatsoi Salad with Toasted Almonds, White Raisins, and Sautéed Goat Cheese;Caramelized Onion and Curry Vinaigrette/Viognier Reserve 2006

With this course, I was out to demonstrate that Viognier—Virginia's premier white grape—can indeed stand up to bold flavors. I was once told by a winery owner around here that I would kill her Viognier with bold flavors. I didn't. This dish is a result of asking myself the question, "Self, what kind of dish would you pair a big, fruity white with?" Among the answers was a mild curry. Given the wine's position on the menu, I decided that a salad with curry flavors might be just the thing. And it was an excellent pairing.

Tatsoi is a Brassica with dark green, spoon-shaped leaves that have a slight cabbage flavor and is an ideal green for pairing with bold flavors. I suspected that the wine had been through full malolactic fermentation (and I was right) so I added the goat cheese to give the dish a bit of acid to play against the creaminess of the wine. The dressing is made from caramelized onions, a bit of Madras curry powder, rice wine vinegar, and pure olive oil.

Seared Tuna Chickpeas, Olives, and Tapenade Vinaigrette/Claret 2005

This claret is a very light red, a blend in fact of both red and white grapes. This seems to be a common trend at local wineries as a way to induce white wine drinkers to taste reds. The result is always an inexpensive, light-bodied quaffing wine. I happen to love light-bodied reds with tuna. For myself, I will pick a Pinot Noir or Sangiovese with tuna, if I'm not drinking beer or sake. I also wanted to get people a bit out of their comfort zone by pairing red wine with fish.

The trick here was to reinforce the red theme with the accompanying chickpea salad. I think of chickpeas as red-wine food because of their earthiness and I reinforced that with olives, diced red onion, garlic, and smoky pimentón. The salad was dressed in a vinaigrette made from classic tapenade ingredients: anchovy-stuffed olives, thyme, parsley, garlic, red wine vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil.

Panisse with Grilled Mediterranean Vegetables: Baked Chickpea Cake with Grilled Red Peppers, Cipollini Onions, and Fennel/Cabernet Franc 2006

Cabernet Franc always speaks to me of grilled vegetables, especially red peppers and eggplant. I would have paired these vegetables with grilled leg of lamb except that our guests included several who eat no red meat. Instead, I opted to make a classic panisse: chickpea flour cooked just like polenta, spread to solidify on a sheet tray, cut into circles with a ring mold, and crisped in olive oil.

I flavored the panisse with garlic and a good bit of pimentón (what can I say? I was in a pimentón mood yesterday) to give what is a very bland starch some character. We charred the sweet red peppers on the grill, peeled and julienned them. We roasted the cipollini in the oven until just done and cut the fennel into wedges and grilled them. The fennel went into a marinade of olive oil, garlic, and herbs. Then we formed a salad by mixing all the vegetables with some of the fennel marinade and served it on top of warm circles of panisse, a nice contrast of temperatures.

“French Onion Soup:” Crouston Topped with Braised Beef Shin, Caramelized Onions, and Local Gouda Surrounded by French Onion Soup/Meritage 2005

This is a dish I thought of a couple weeks ago and we just happened to have a big red wine to pair it with at this dinner. A big Bordeaux blend needs something substantial and this re-imagining of classic onion soup is nothing if not substantial.

To start, we had our butcher in Philly cut ossobuco of beef for us, which we then braised in lots of red wine. Once the beef was cooked, the braising liquids and more red wine went into the soup pot with 20lbs of caramelized onions (eight hours it took to caramelize them) for a classic onion soup base.

To re-imagine the dish, we toasted rounds of herbed focaccia and topped them with shredded beef, caramelized onions, and slabs of local Gouda-style cheese from our friend Allen Bassler at Oak Spring Dairy. We placed these in the oven until the cheese melted and then placed them into oval gratins of the soup for service. By the time they were at the table, the crouton had absorbed the majority of the soup.

Our forthcoming wine dinners are always listed on the Events Calendar on the restaurant web site.