Three recipes for Fall 2021
This fall I am sharing three (coincidentally meatless) recipes that pair wonderfully with the recently released 2020 vintage Marginalia wines. The radicchio and apple salad is an elaboration on one of the ideas featured in this article on radicchio from last fall. The celery root soup is a riff on the celery root veloute recipe from James Peterson’s Splendid Soups (this book as well as his Sauces and Glorious French Food deserve a place on everyone’s bookshelf). Finally, I’ve included a discussion of Khachapuri—Georgian cheese bread—with a recipe you can use as starting points for your own variations.
Shredded Radicchio and Apple Salad
Shred a head of radicchio, preferring a leafy type over a large-ribbed type. If you do use a large-ribbed radicchio, just make sure to shred finely across the grain of the ribs.
Pile the radicchio in the center of a platter and drizzle with a simple vinaigrette: 2 parts olive oil to 1 part red wine vinegar or sherry vinegar; you can drizzle these over separately. Season with salt and a few grinds of black pepper.
Either grate or cut fine batons from a crisp apple and scatter them over the radicchio---honeycrisp is good here because sweetness is important. Grate long shreds of a funky alpine-style cheese like Gruyere, Alpenzeller, Comte, Montassio, or similar cheese over the apple (any nutty-funky cheese you might use for fondue or raclette works well). Toss this all together before serving to help keep the apple from browning. If you have to hold the salad for a while, you can toss the apple batons with lemon juice before assembling the salad.
Microplane some fresh horseradish root over the salad just before you tuck in. A little goes a long way with the horseradish. Prepared horseradish can be substituted, but it’s not as good. To substitute prepared horseradish, mix up a teaspoon or two with the vinegar and oil before you dress the radicchio.
This recipe is a much simplified version of a radicchio salad served at Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder, CO. I like to serve this salad with the Marginalia Light Red Wine.
Pureed Celery root soup with Herb Butter
Peel and roughly cube a celery root and a large gold/waxy potato. The celery root should be cubed smaller than the potato because it takes longer to soften. Chop a yellow or white onion, a few shallots, or the equivalent volume of the white ends of leeks (or a mix of these). In the end you want roughly equal quantities of celery root, potato, and onion/shallot/leek.
Cover the vegetables with stock, water, milk, or a mixture of liquids in a pot that gives you a couple inches of room to spare in case the boiling gets vigorous. If you want to really highlight the vegetable flavors, you can go for 100% plain water with a big pinch of MSG; this amps up the background intensity like broth does, but without adding (much) competing flavor and aroma. Set the pot on the stove and bring it to a moderate boil. If you’re using water or broth, it can cook mostly unattended, but if you use milk, you might want to stir it occasionally to prevent scorching.
While the vegetables are cooking, prepare a compound butter to garnish the soup. Any herb butter will do, but I prefer to use celery leaves and parsley to reinforce the celery flavor with complimentary fresh elements. You can also add tarragon, lemon zest, chervil, or any other herbs that go well with celery. Rinse and dry your herbs, then chop them on a board with a small quantity of butter until you have a reasonably homogeneous mass of minced herbs and butter. I don’t weigh this before I start, but I target a roughly equal weight of butter and herbs for the mix, which means a large volume of leaves compared to the volume of butter. The exact proportions aren’t very important---it just has to come together into a cohesive mass.
Once the vegetables have softened to your liking, ladle the soup into a blender. Blend the soup and return it to the pot, passing through a sieve if you don’t have much faith in your blender. A stick blender works OK too, but you may want to still pass the puree through a sieve into another pot to get out any tough bits that you missed.
Enrich the soup with cream—anywhere from a splash to a cup. You can further adjust the texture with stock or water or milk and heat to whatever temperature you like your soup. Don’t hold it at a simmer or let it come back to a boil though—this interferes with the velvety texture you get right out of the blender. Season it to taste with salt and pepper after you’ve adjusted the texture.
Serve the soup in a shallow soup bowl with a blob of herb butter melting in the center.
This recipe is abstracted loosely from James Peterson’s Splendid Soups and provides a useful template for any range of pureed vegetable soups: starchier vegetables might want less potato, some vegetables might want less onion, and some vegetables like tomato do better with leftover white rice as a starchy thickener instead of potatoes. The herb butter can be varied to match or contrast with the vegetable base, but parsley butter is almost always a good starting point. Consider, for example, orange or lemon peel and/or fennel fronds in the butter for a carrot soup or nutmeg grated into parsley butter for a parsnip soup.
This soup becomes a light dinner or a fancy lunch with a big hunk of crusty bread and a bottle of light-bodied red wine (e.g., the 2020 Marginalia Red Wine).
Adjaruli Khachapuri
Georgia and neighboring areas of the Caucasus have a great and diverse filled bread tradition. There are bean breads, potato breads, breads filled with greens, and so on. Adjaruli Khachapuri is one of a wide range of cheese-filled breads (Khachapuri); Adjaruli Khachapuri is distinguished by its boat-like shape and runny egg topping.
For the bread component there are a lot of approaches that work. You can use a lean dough or an enriched dough with equally tasty results. My sense is that more traditional versions use a lightly enriched dough. I usually end up using a ball of sourdough pizza dough—a lean dough—because that’s usually what I have lying around.
A typical filling is a mix of a imeruli and sulguni cheeses, which are not widely available in the US. There are a range of substitutions suggested by cookery writers and food YouTubers. Following many of these sources, my best results have come from a mix of mozzarella (dry/block, not fresh/water packed) and sheep’s milk feta in brine. I use about a 50/50 mix of mozzarella and feta cheeses to good effect. Some recipes suggest more mozzarella, but I like the added funky-salty flavor from a higher proportion of feta.
The bread is formed so that a wall of dough rises to contain a puddle of melted cheese. The standard garnish is a raw egg or an egg yolk and a knob of butter, which you stir into the cheese just as you dig in. In the end, Adjaruli Khachapuri is a sort of self-saucing fondue: you rip off hunks of bread and dredge them through the liquefied cheese, so that by the time the bread wall has been breached, the cheese has diminished and coagulated enough to prevent overflows. I’ve included my recipe below, but I recommend that you find any one of many videos on YouTube to see how to shape the dough before baking. (America’s Test Kitchen/Cook’s Country did a video recently (their recipe is predictably good), and there are a bunch of videos posted by home cooks and food YouTubers that show different shapes and forming techniques; this video shows several different approaches.)
Here’s my take
Make the dough the day before you want to serve the Khachapuri. If you have a favorite pizza dough, just use that. This is my general formula for sourdough pizza dough:
Per 100g type 00 flour,
70g water [70% hydration]
2g salt
30-40g old dough (a knob of dough I saved in a bag in the fridge from the last batch)
0.25g instant/rapid yeast if the old dough is more than two days old
I usually make about 2 kg of dough at a time from 1000g of flour, 700g water, 20 g salt, 300-400g old dough, and 2.5 g yeast. This is a nice batch size for the dough hook in a counter top stand mixer. I’ll make Khachapuri and other Georgian filled breads (beet greens or chard and butter, bean and onion with marigolds, etc.) over the next day or two to take maximum advantage of the puff in the younger dough and then later in the week make pizzas, where a little more tang and crunch is welcome and loft in the crumb is less important.
Mix everything and knead till nicely textured and smooth—this usually takes about 10 minutes in the mixer with a dough hook. Let the dough rise for a few hours in a greased, covered bowl until it approximately doubles in volume. Divide into roughly 400 gram blobs, bag them separately in lightly oiled plastic bags, and hold them in the fridge for up to a week. Khachapuri works best with one day old dough and is a little dicey with week-old dough because you depend on a vigorous rise to contain the lake of molten cheese at the center of the bread. I have included a note on using older dough for khachapuri below—the result is not quite as good, but less than ideal khachapuri is still far better than no khachapuri.
Here’s an alternative recipe if you don’t have a blob of old dough sitting around—this makes enough dough for two Khachapuri; the recipe is based on Mark Vetri’s 70% hydration “Old School Naples Dough” from pp. 69-71 in Mastering Pizza, Ten Speed, 2018; I reduced the salt because the cheese filling is plenty salty:
Scant 2 teaspoons (10 g) of fine salt or a tablespoon of diamond crystal kosher salt
1.5 cups (350g) cool water
A three-finger pinch (a tenth of a gram) of instant/rapid yeast—well under a quarter teaspoon
3.5-3.75 cups (500 g) bread flour—Vetri formulates the recipe with King Arthur Bread Flour, which is a strong (12.7% protein), unbleached white flour
Combine the water, salt, and yeast in a bowl or the work bowl of a mixer. Mix in the flour and knead the dough by hand or with a dough hook for ten or more minutes until you get a smooth, slightly bouncy blob. Ferment in an oiled, covered bowl for 4-8 hours—don’t let it get much bigger than double its original volume. (As long as there are clear signs of life within 8 hours, you’re good to go.) Split the dough into two blobs and form them into balls. Store the dough balls in lightly oiled plastic bags in the fridge overnight, or for up to a week. This will be less sour and less interesting than the sourdough version, but by using only a very small quantity of yeast, there will still be some bacterial complexity. I include proportionally more yeast in the sourdough version because I want to give the yeast a fighting chance against all the other organisms in the old dough.
Whatever dough you use, for each khachapuri you want 400-450 g/one pound of dough and 200-250 g/8oz of cheese. Start with a mix of approximately equal parts dry-packed mozzarella and brined sheep’s milk feta. Shred and crumble these two cheeses and then mix them together. Don’t use pre-shredded mozzarella or pre-crumbled feta because they have anti-caking additives that will mess with your melt, and they taste less fresh. I used to mess around with all manner of additional herbs and seasonings in the filling, but I have found that I prefer a plain Khachapuri with a plate of herbs and raw vegetables on the side.
Forming instructions for 1-2 day old dough: Roll the dough into a big oval, 12-14 inches wide and 10-12 inches tall. Place the dough oval on a baking sheet or a parchment paper lined baking sheet---its OK if the sheet is too small at this point because we roll up the edges of the dough to make the sides. Roll up the edges, starting on the wide sides, to create a football or wide canoe-shaped bread bowl, pinching the ends to make a strong seal. The inner enclosed roundish depression should be at least 6 inches in diameter. Fill this depression with cheese. The cheese will mound up above the rim, but if it is more than twice the height of the dough wall, you might want to slightly stretch the dough to give the cheese a little more space to puddle. Cover the filled dough with plastic to rise for another half hour or so. Bake it at 350 F until the dough starts to gently brown and the cheese is bubbling in the center. You can experiment with higher temperatures to get different flavors and more browning, but with increased risk that the cheese will go a bit greasy.
Forming instructions for older dough: Roll the dough into a big oval as above. Put the oval on some parchment. Divide the cheese mix into two quarters and a half. Line each of the long edges of the dough with one quarter of the cheese and then roll up the edges as above to form high sides around a six-inch diameter depression. Pinch the ends to make a good seal and fill the center with the remaining cheese. The problem with older dough is that it won’t rise as well, but by building some of the cheese into the walls themselves, we get higher walls and we’ve got less cheese to contain in the central depression. Bake at 350 F until the dough starts to brown and the cheese is bubbling in the center. Usually the cheese-stuffed crusts rupture and spill into the central reservoir, but not before the height is set and sufficient to contain all the cheese. This version is not quite as nice, in my opinion, because the filled crust is a ways a little wet on the inside.
Serving: Whichever version you make, while the Khachapuri is still hot, make a little depression in the center of the cheese puddle. Drop in an egg yolk and a tablespoon of good butter. Quickly present this to your dinner companions and then stir the whole mess together with a fork to lightly cook the egg and emulsify the cheese-butter puddle. Rip off the ends (and eventually the walls) to dredge through the slowly coagulating cheese. Once the cheese has hardened a bit, you can cut the remains into pieces with a knife or pizza wheel. Try it with a tannic amber wine, like the 2020 Marginalia Amber Wine, and a plate of herbs, pickles, and raw vegetables.