Linguine with raw tuna: Beautiful but blah

In today’s “Cooking Off the Cuff” at WashingtonPost.com, I write about a really delicious tuna dish made in a kind of Sicilian style – including the doneness of the fish, which is cooked through but still nice and moist. Prepared this way, the fish stands up beautifully to the very flavorful garnish/sauce of tomatoes, garlic, olives and herbs.

A week or so later, I had what seemed like a brilliant idea for dinner using similar ingredients, this time in a pasta dish. But it turned out to be not so brilliant: I ignored my own advice about using cooked-through tuna with these strong flavors.

The idea was to make a pasta sauce very much like the garnish for the tuna dish I wrote about in The Post, then to add, at the table, diced raw tuna, which I figured would cook a bit in the heat of the linguine. It looked gorgeous, like little jewels (or maybe diced gummi bears). 

But the little points of blandness among all the higher flavors were almost disgusting. Dressing raw tuna with big flavors is one thing; putting it in a standalone environment of equally big flavors is quite another. An interesting lesson: Next time I’ll give the diced tuna a quick sauté, then add it to the sauce.

One successful thing about that dish (which was lovely apart from the tuna) was that I "filleted" the tomatoes beforehand and cooked the goo and seeds with herbs, garlic and lots of oil, then pressed this through a strainer and added it to the sauce when the time came. 

Delicious – I could have dressed pasta with this on its own or spooned it onto grilled bread. It reminded me of a lobster sauce base but without the lobster, if you see what I mean: viscous, concentrated, flavorsome.

Ignoring my own advice: the wages of stubbornness

Earlier this month, in The Washington Post’s “Cooking Off the Cuff,” I wrote about a nice way of cooking potatoes – here. In that posting I warned, “I don’t recommend doing this with potatoes that are less firm than my Russian bananas [fingerlings]. Something like a russet potato cut into chunks would too readily fall apart, not that it wouldn’t taste good.”

Well, a couple of nights ago I ignored my own sage advice and took a chance: I used russets for what could have been a nice variation on that dish. I’d been to the farmers’ market and bought some of that charming spring garlic whose pearly white cloves have not yet formed the papery skins that separate them in the mature heads. I thought it would be lovely quartered and butter-glazed along with potatoes.

Those firm-fleshed fingerlings were no longer available, and I stubbornly went forward with the plan using cut-up russets from the supermarket, to which I added the garlic heads, quartered, and then cooked with chicken stock, butter and rosemary.

As I’d known perfectly well, the potatoes couldn’t stand up to this treatment; they were just too fragile by the time they were tender. So I took a fork and mashed everything up, coarsely. It looked like hell, but tasted fine. I can’t say I was disappointed, because I knew just what was going to happen. But I felt silly for having hoped, even for a moment, that my original advice had been over-cautious.

Here’s what I ought to have done: I should have glazed the garlic separately, then added it to potatoes I’d cooked in a different way.

Next time, perhaps I’ll pay attention to my own warnings.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time

If this had worked out, I’d have posted it on The Washington Post’s All We Can Eat blog. But, as you’ll see, it didn’t.

I love turnips: their juiciness; their slight mustardy sharpness combined with sweetness; their crunch if you don’t overcook them, or their yielding texture if you do. I often glaze little ones in a covered pan with butter, a little water and a very little sugar (and salt of course): this cooks them in steam, then slicks them with a sweet, buttery coating, a bit of which penetrates into the flesh, especially if I take the trouble to peel them.

On a seemingly unrelated subject, I’ve developed a crush on Italian red vermouth, specifically Carpano Antica Formula. I was originally attracted – or, more accurately, suckered in – by the beautiful label, but soon came to love this complex wine-based drink, either on its own or in cocktails. Then one day I added some to an orange sauce for duck. It turned out to be a quick way of getting lots of bittersweet herbal, citric flavor into a dish (as long as the sweetness wasn’t an issue, which it wouldn’t have been in an fruit based sauce).

Sweetness, a great set of flavors and, indeed, a lovely color: how about using vermouth to cook turnips? If I were careful not to burn it, it would probably reduce down to a delicious glaze on its own, and if it were a little too intense I could most likely smooth it by finishing the dish with a pat of butter. There were many ways to go about this: two that came to mind were, first, precooking the turnips and then “sautéing” them in vermouth to reheat them; and, second, partially cooking them in my usual way, with butter and a drop of water (but no sugar, because there’s some in the vermouth), then finishing them with a glazing in Carpano Antica Formula.

But then the simplest method of all dawned on me: put the turnips in a small pan into which they’d fit tightly, add vermouth to just about cover, put the lid on and simply simmer them with no other ingredient but salt. When ready to serve, I’d reheat them, reducing the vermouth to a glaze, and finish with a teaspoon more butter.

So that’s what I did, over medium heat, stirring every now and then…...

SCREEEEECH!! (Sound of brakes being applied, or of a stylus scratching across a vinyl record.)

Except that, as Jackie observed when she walked into the kitchen, it smelled like burning rubber. The turnips didn’t taste as bad, presumably, as an automobile tire (even a Michelin one), but they weren’t very good. Guests left some on their plates; Jackie and I left some on ours. Clearly the mistake was to cook the vermouth longer than it likes to be cooked.

In an attempt to avoid this, I went back at the next opportunity to Plan A (2): cook the turnips in the usual way, then finish briefly with vermouth, which I hoped would capture the interesting flavors but not distort them to ugliness. Except it was still no good. This time, the juice itself (like a vermouth-butter emulsion) wasn't half bad, but it tasted lousy with the turnips. Maybe I'll try it as a standalone sauce some day. But not any time soon.

 

By the way, an old Carpano vermouth factory in Turin, Italy, is the site of the original Eataly gastro-hall, the model for the one in New York.