The Ultimate Rice Cooker (42 page)
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons chicken stock
⅔ cup reduced-sugar or unsweetened cranberry juice cocktail or unsweetened cranberry juice
3 tablespoons dried cranberries
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 shallot, chopped
1 small bulb fennel, stalks and greens discarded, bulb chopped (about 1¼ cups)
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1. Place the rice in the rice cooker bowl. Add the stock and cranberry juice; stir a few times to combine. Close the cover and set for the regular/Brown Rice cycle.
2. When the machine switches to the Keep Warm cycle, add the cranberries, close the cover, and let the rice steam for 15 minutes.
3. While the rice is steaming, melt the butter in a medium-size sauté pan over medium heat. Add the shallot and fennel and cook, stirring, until tender, 5 to 8 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. When the rice has finished steaming, stir the fennel mixture into the rice. Adjust the seasonings again and serve hot.
ABOUT COUSCOUS
Although couscous is the national dish of northern African countries like Tunisia and Morocco, it is considered an ethnic grain in the United States. To food professionals, couscous is known as the grain with an identity crisis; it is considered both a pasta and a grain, depending on the ingredients. Attributed to the nomadic Berbers, who have been eating couscous for over 2,000 years, the staple starch found its place in Moorish cuisine. It is traditionally served before the dessert course on a shallow serving platter with stewed meat and vegetables on top, extra meat or poultry broth, and harissa, the fiery Tunisian hot sauce, on the side.
Couscous is made from semolina flour, the flour ground from durum wheat that is used to make premium Italian pastas, thus the association with pasta. If barley or millet flour and grits are used instead of the semolina, couscous instantly becomes a grain, but the semolina version is far more common.
Couscous can be made by hand and is a specialty in cooking classes in North African cuisine, such as the ones given by Paula Wolfert. She claims that making homemade couscous is easier than making pasta or even bread. Fine semolina flour is combined with coarse semolina, water, salt, and olive oil in a shallow wooden or earthenware bowl until the water is absorbed and the mixture sticks together. Using your open fingers and palm, and rhythmically mixing in one direction only, the mixture is deftly “rolled” to form granules called the couscous “beads.” The beads are pressed through three sieves of varying sizes to create the small, uniform bits of couscous. The smallest are
s’ffa
and are very tiny indeed, but couscous comes in a variety of sizes. This fresh couscous is ready to be cooked. If the couscous is to be stored, it is oven- or sun-dried.
Our commercial brands of couscous, usually a medium-size granule that has been pre-steamed and labeled “instant,” are made by using the vats and chutes of modern production methods; it will swell during cooking to about twice its dry size.
Villa Floriani Grilled Polenta with Sausages
Polenta, grits, and hominy have one thing in common: they are all products made from corn. All have the delicate sweet flavor that is distinctly “corny,” but each is made quite differently.
Is there any home gardener who has not tried his or her hand at a few rows of corn? The familiar tassel coming out the top of the ear, tightly covered by the husk which protects the multiple kernels that are developing in rows on the inner cob—it is a vegetable as familiar as a child’s nursery rhyme. This is known as field corn and the pleasure of corn on the cob is an American summer ritual. When this soft, juicy corn is allowed to mature and dry on the stalk, the sugar turns to starch. This is the corn that is made into myriad corn products, including polenta, grits, and hominy.
Corn is one of the oldest cultivated grains, and a New World plant that reached Europe and beyond only because of the Columbus maritime exploration teams. In 1496 Columbus brought the first corn plants from the Caribbean islands back to Spain. Within 200 years, Indian corn would take its place as one of the three most important cereals around the world, from Mexico to China.
The Italians were the first Europeans to plant cornfields, in Crete. Enough of the new grain was grown to supply the entire Mediterranean Basin. The Near East became a golden field of maize and it was referred to as Turkish corn. Wherever the Ottoman army traveled, they left behind this grain that had become a staple in their traveling outdoor army kitchens. Corn became commonplace from the Euphrates River valley and Africa to Hungary and the Balkans.
Remember that, with all these corn products, if they are stone-ground and contain the germ and bran, they are highly perishable. Store cornmeal in the freezer for 6 to 12 months. Degerminated meals can be kept in the cupboard, tightly covered, indefinitely.
POLENTA
“Just as our greatest architectural surprise in Italy was to find St. Francis’ first church was a log cabin (at Assisi), so were we amazed to discover that the Italians do even more delicious and interesting things with cornmeal than you can find in the (American) deep south” was how an early edition of
Joy of
Cooking
introduced its readers to polenta cornmeal mush.
In the 1600s, an Italian farmer was asked to cultivate some of the seed plants of this Turkish corn for Romanian royalty so they could cook it up into a porridge, one that was usually made from millet. The result was a bright yellow-orange variety of flint corn, with its hard shell that looks translucent like a piece of amber—still cultivated today in northern Italy specifically for polenta. It is a dish still made in neighboring Romania as
mamaliga
and
puliszka
in Hungary. While you can most certainly make polenta with a medium or coarse grind of regular yellow cornmeal, it will not be authentic unless you get the strain of cornmeal specifically milled for polenta.
Polenta is a ground cornmeal that is degermed and it comes in a coarse or fine grind, regular or instant (traditionalists scoff at this last, since it is cooked, then dehydrated, but many cooks swear it has its own place in the kitchen, such as for frying). Toss a fistful of coarse cornmeal into boiling water, cook and stir with plenty of muscle for an hour, and you have polenta, a creamy gruel that can be eaten like oatmeal or poured out onto a plate in a thick layer, cooled, and cut into cubes to put into soup or pan-fried. It is a food that is so humble that it was once considered a staple peasant food with lower status than bread, but, of course, food so simple in the hands of a good cook ends up ingeniously versatile. While polenta today is usually made exclusively from corn, polenta is a regional dish that can be made from any number of grains—eastern Europe and Russia make their polenta mush from fine buckwheat groats; Polish cooks use farina; northern Italians also use millet.
Polenta has a long shelf life and can be kept in a canister in the cupboard, but keep it in the freezer if you buy it in bulk and plan to use it over a year. If you want authentic polenta, you must buy an imported brand, but there are also some domestic polentas available in natural food stores, so you can take your pick. It comes in yellow or white versions, with the yellow having the more robust flavor and the white, a specialty of Venice served in place of rice or pasta, more subtle and delicate. Our specialty grocery stocks a brand called Moretti, which comes in unique flavorful varieties: Lampo (instant), Taragna (with buckwheat meal or flour, a specialty of the Valtellina Valley in northern Italy), Friulana (from Italian white corn), and Integrale (with wheat germ), a testament to the many different ways the Italians can dress up cornmeal mush.
While authentic polenta has instructions for constantly stirring over low heat to prevent lumping, it can be made in the rice cooker with great success, without the laborious stirring. For the smoothest polenta, use the Porridge cycle. Polenta can be made in the on/off machine, but it is not as smooth, and you must not overload the cooker or it will boil over. On the regular cycle, you must stir two or three times during the cooking and stir thoroughly when the cycle completes. The closed environment of the rice cooker prevents a top crust from forming, but it does concentrate the flavor of the salt, so the amount of salt used is less than you would normally use if you were cooking polenta in an open saucepan. You can make your polenta soft (more water), to serve immediately out of the cooker in a mound with butter and cheese. Or you can make a stiffer (less water) polenta, to pour into a glass pan to cool, then turn out in a firm block and cut into pieces with a wet knife to grill or fry in a nonstick skillet with some olive oil as a side dish, or to be layered in a casserole like lasagne. Polenta works well with any sauce that is good on pasta—a light fresh tomato sauce or a rich ragu with meatballs, or topped with a meat stew. Cut polenta with a small cookie cutter and bake it with a topping of Gorgonzola, another native foodstuff of Lombardy, and you have a nice, filling appetizer. Soft polenta can be made ahead and held on the Keep Warm cycle for hours. To simplify cleanup, fill the rice cooker bowl with cold water and soak for 10 minutes before washing.
Italian polenta, the darling of all teachers of Italian cuisine, is labeled
farina di granoturco
on the package, the Italian name of corn since the time of Columbus. It was often made in a traditional copper polenta pot, replete with a special wooden stirring stick, that was handed down within rural families. This is a really nice, fluffy polenta that is foolproof. It uses two full cycles of the Porridge cycle. It thickens considerably during the second cycle and even spits a few times during the cooking. You can double the recipe in a large 10-cup machine. Serve with the Parmesan and a pat of garlic butter for a lovely treat, or sprinkled with grated Fontina cheese.
MACHINE: Medium (6-cup) rice cooker ;
fuzzy logic (preferred) or on/off
CYCLE: Porridgeor regular
YIELD: Serves 4
4 cups water
1 cup coarse-grain yellow polenta
½ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup (½ stick) unsalted butter, or more to taste
⅔ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (optional)
1. Place the water in the rice cooker bowl. Add the polenta and salt; stir for 15 seconds with a wooden spoon or wooden or plastic rice paddle. Close the cover and set for the Porridge or regular cycle. A few times during the cooking, open the cover, stir for 15 seconds, then close the cover.
Sometimes you want just a little bit of hot polenta mush with butter and Parmesan or Asiago cheese to serve as a side dish. This is the perfect recipe.
MACHINE: Small (4-cup) rice cooker ; fuzzy logic ( p referred) or on/off
CYCLE: Porridge or regular
YIELD: Serves 1 to 2
3 tablespoons coarse-grain yellow polenta
1 cup water
¼ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons unsalted butter
1. Place the polenta, water, and salt in the rice cooker bowl; stir to combine. Close the cover and set for the Porridge or regular cycle.
