Alien Ingredient #1: Dwarf Truffle Peaches

Dwarf truffle peaches. The name was enough to get me to order a jar of these sight unseen. I mean seriously WTF do peaches, truffles, and dwarves have to do with each other?

These come from Italy where they pickle the immature green fruit that they thin to reduce the fruit load on the trees so as to increase the size and flavor of the remaining peaches and/or so as not to overload the branches to the point where they might snap.* After pickling, they are packed in a truffle oil. This jar contains a full kilogram of product and a good liter of nice tasting truffle oil. In fact, the biggest win of this product may be using the truffle oil to flavor dishes long after the peaches are gone. I can already imagine browning spätzle in it or dressing green beans in it.

[*The original text, quoted from manufacturer's web site read: "any unripe tiny green peaches off the trees at the end of the season". There aren't unripe green peaches on trees at the end of the season.]

The peaches are the size of very large olives and are very crisp all the way through. The pit is undeveloped as you can see in the photo, so the whole thing is edible. The pickle cure is a bit vinegary but also a bit sweet. The peaches themselves are very crispy crunchy in a pleasant way. You wouldn't want to eat more than a couple of them (nor most other pickles) but they will make neat garnishes for charcuterie plates and would definitely make quite the upscale martini garnish.

You gotta love the label that looks like it was cooked up on somebody's home computer and printed on his ink jet printer. How sketchy!

Vote: pretty cool product packed in an oil that may be more useful than the product itself. We like these cute little guys.

Chef's Table

Here are some photos from a Chef's Table dinner back in early July. This menu is a celebration of the new produce that arrived this week: beets, new potatoes, napa cabbage, cavolo nero, cauliflower, pluots, and peaches.


Chłodnik. It's hot, it's beet season, and there are some dill pickles from last season to be used. Time for this lovely Polish take on cold beet soup.



Early Summer Vegetable Plate. It was still too early for peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes—that glorious summer trio—when we did this dinner. So we made do with summer squash and green tomatoes. Here you see a miniature squash cake, a fried green tomato, and pesto goat cheese truffle, all garnished with various little bits from the plants on our deck.



Arctic Char. This dish isn't so much about the char as what the char is sitting on: a smoked bluefish new potato salad. This was an exercise in using the first new potatoes of the year. The char is notable really only for the way that it is cooked: skin side down on the grill until it reaches medium rare. The heat stays on the fatty skin side and yields a very delicate product.



Pork Confit on Kimchee. This dish is all about using the first napa cabbage of the year. I did a quick overnight kimchee pickle on it so that it was still fairly crunchy. We topped it with shreds of our latest batch of pork confit.



Grilled Lamb Loin and Cavolo Nero Packet. How fortunate for us that we got the first delivery of the season of cauliflower and cavolo nero on the same day that we received a new lamb. Here then is a piece of top loin (the New York strip if you will) wrapped in cavolo nero and grilled along with a cauliflower purée, red wine-lamb stock reduction, and chanterelle mushrooms.



Peach, Pluot, and French Toast Napoleon. Peaches and pluots just hit the market the week of this tasting and so it was a no-brainer that they were going to feature in dessert. The napoleon is sitting in a pool of cherry soup, made from the very last of the cherries from this season.

A Peach is a Beautiful Thing

About 7 or 8 years ago, I started seeing these flat peaches for sale in the local area. Being the sort to adopt any stray produce with which I am not acquainted, I brought a bunch of these peaches home to try, after first inquiring what they were called. I was told that they are called Saturn peaches, after the rings of that particular planet. I've since learned that they are also called doughnut peaches, for obvious enough reasons.

I can tell you from a vast amount of personal experimentation on the subject that a tree-ripened Saturn is an ambrosial, juicy delight. These may be the juiciest peaches I've ever had the pleasure of letting dribble down my chin! I've had them in both yellow and white flesh, the preponderance being white. They have very thin skins, making them difficult to transport, and almost no fuzz, making them a joy to eat out of hand without peeling. Of course, I've never let a little fuzz stand between me and any peach. And they are freestone to boot.

Thanks to our friends at Rutgers (anyone remember the old light pink to orange Rutgers tomatoes?), more and more Saturns are finding their way to market. The breeders at Rutgers developed a tree that is more cold tolerant than its Chinese parents, allowing peach growers in most areas of the US to grow this wonderful peach.

And wonderful it is. I really really love this peach and that is saying something because I really really love peaches and this one stands out head and shoulders above most of them. They are best tree ripened and those you find in the grocery store were picked green, of necessity, because of their thin skins. Look for Saturn peaches at a farmers market near you. You will thank me.

Zanahorias en Escabeche

I've been fond of pickles my entire life. My mother, her mother, her mother, my aunts, all the women in my family, were accomplished pickle makers. When I was growing up, making pickles was what you did to put the summer bounty by for the winter.

I remember dipping peaches in a gigantic pot of boiling water in the already steamy August kitchen and peeling them until I was sick of them. They'd be loaded into canning jars, topped off with a heavily spiced syrup, and processed to seal the jars, adding yet more steam to the kitchen. Likewise for all manner of other things: figs in lemon syrup, hundreds and hundreds of jars of dill pickles, lime (sweet) pickles, okra, pepper relish, green beans, tomatoes and tomato juice, beets, and so forth and so on. Hardly anyone puts things by any longer, but I still remember the hot and sweaty labor with some fondness and a lot of nostalgia.

I still like to put up things for my customers; well, if the truth be told, it's probably for me, to reconnect me to the generations of my family who have done so. I try not to dwell on the idea that I will probably be the last of my family and the last generation to do so. My children seem to have little interest in the kitchen.

Last August, I put up a bushel of pickled peaches using my mother's recipe, which was certainly her mother's and her mother's before her. The peaches were outstanding and we managed to eke them out with roasted duck breast into the new year. I often make quick cucumber pickles for same day use. I put up half a bushel of lemons just recently to use in my tagines, something that the women in my family might look askance at. I can just hear the hens now, "Whoever heard of pickled lemons?" But they'd be proud that I am carrying the torch, no matter that it is foreordained to sputter out in the not terribly distant future.

My latest endeavor involves a style of pickle that I first encountered when I moved to Texas in my early 20s. As I have written previously, I was pretty desperately poor in those days, and when I could eat out, it was alongside the Mexican laborers in the local tacqueria/dive. Señora would always bring a dish of pickled jalapeños to the table with the beans and tortillas or menudo (tripe, if I was feeling particularly flush) and tortillas. And I always counted myself fortunate if I found some sliced carrots and onions in the jalapeños. I came to love the spicy carrots in red wine or cider vinegar brine.

I love them so much that this time, I dispensed altogether with the jalapeños and just pickled the carrots. I also kept the spice level down so that I could share them with my customers. I wonder if they will sense the history behind these carrots?