Tuscan Mediterranean seduction: Chicken from the grill

Crisp grilled chicken with its golden skin not only smells seductively good, but is also a feast for the eyes. An outdoor grill is not needed with a Fissler Crispy Steelux^® frypan with the patented Novogrill^® surface. The waffled surface of the pan produces that beautiful grilled look and taste and because you are cooking in a pan, the juices are retained to produce the sauce. Tuscan Lemon Chicken is a pleasant beginning to a long culinary evening with family or friends. 

TUSCAN LEMON CHICKEN

Ingredients for 4 servings:
1 small chicken, cut into six pieces

2 cloves of garlic
1 small bunch of thyme
2 stems of rosemary
1 teaspoon crushed chili pepper
zest and juice of a large lemon

8 tablespoons olive oil
5 shallots
1 bunch scallions
1 zucchini
10 small potatoes (red or yukon gold)
1 pint of cherry tomatoes

water, wine or broth as needed
coarse sea salt

Preparation:
Wash herbs and remove leaves from stalks.
Finely chop herbs and garlic and mix with chili, lemon zest and 5 tablespoons oil.
Brush the chicken pieces with mixture and marinate covered for 1 hour.
Cut shallots into quarters lengthwise.

Trim scallions and cut into diagonal one inch lengths.

Cut zucchini in half lengthwise and then into  ¼ inch slices.

Scrub potatoes and quarter.
Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil on medium/high heat in 11 inch Fissler Crispy Steelux^® frypan.
Brown chicken pieces on all sides.
Add shallots and sauté for five minutes.

Add potatoes, tomatoes, lemon juice and sea salt to taste.

Simmer on medium/low heat, covered with glass lid for about 20 minutes.

Add small amounts of water, chicken broth or white wine if liquid in pan reduces too much.
After 20 minutes add zucchini and scallions
Cook covered another 5 minutes or until zucchini is tender, stirring occasionally.
Serve with ciabatta bread.

 

Food From the Grill and Jordan Wine in the Glass

We post recipes here at Fissler Foodies so that you can make fabulous food. And when you go to the effort to cook a great meal, it's nice to complement it with a great wine. We discovered some great wine recently when we attended Jordan Winery's 40th anniversary party. And when we explored Jordan's website we found great recipes!

Jordan makes only two wines: a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Chardonnay. I usually don't like Chardonnay but this one was dry and not overly oaky, characteristics that made it transcend the typical California chardonnay. The Cab was fantastic. I know good wine when I taste it, thought I'm not a wine expert so I'm going to quote a few words from the winemaker that definitely applied to my experience: "smooth, approachable, a spectrum of fruit flavors...interwoven with a hint of spicy oak".

The recipe section of Jordan's website is especially helpful for people like me who appreciate good wine yet don't have special expertise, because the recipes are paired with wine suggestions. So, if you've got a good red wine, like their 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon, they've got some great grilling recipes, like Grilled Japanese Eggplant with Radicchio and Endive and Grilled Hanger Steak. If you don't have a barbecue grill, you can substitute a grill pan like the Fissler Solea frypan which has an innovative interior grilling surface called Novogrill.

Fissler Solea Frypan

Comedians Ben Gleib and Ben Morrison seen at the Jordan Winery party

Hanger steak from the Jordan Winery website. Lots of gorgeous "food porn" like this, at the site.

More grilled steak, at the Jordan Winery 40th anniversary party!

Best New Nonstick Pans in Food and Wine Magazine

Did you see the list of best new non-stick pans in the March issue of Food and Wine magazine? The Fissler Solea frypan is number two on the list. It doesn't look like a nonstick pan. Instead of a black non-stick coating it has a waffled, polished stainless steel surface, called Novogrill. It's not a pan that you would want to make pancakes or an omelette in, like other non-stick pans. The Novogrill surface provides stick resistance, especially when cooking meat, while allowing a browned crust to form on the meat, without the addition of oil. The Novogrill surface is found on other pans in the Fissler cookware range, including the Crispy Steelux pan I cooked this ham steak in. Cooking a thick slice of ham the way you would cook a steak is not something I had ever done before but I saw this great Russian style ham at the deli counter, when I went to buy cheese, and I was inspired. You can do this with canned ham but if you have a good European style deli or butcher with French, German or Eastern European style ham, you'll have the centerpiece of a great dinner.

Here's how to do it:
Slice the ham in thick, 1/4 inch (or even a little thicker) slices (this can be done at the deli counter). Heat the pan on high heat until a drop of water beads on the surface. Lay the slice of ham down and turn the heat down to medium. Allow to brown on one side, then lift off with a fork and turn to the other side. Cook until nicely browned. After you are done cooking, put a glass of water in the pan while it is still hot, to make clean up easier.

A pan pizza and grilled pizza in one

I am willing to begrudgingly admit that pizza is generally better in New York City than anywhere else. A New Yorker might tell you that the old, rusted pipes that carry the city's water supply magically imbues the pizza dough with flavorful qualities. Others might just claim that the ability to make a good pizza is genetically inherent in a New Yorker because the first pizza restaurant in America (Lombardi’s, in 189?) opened there, just as a World Series title is their birthright because one of their local baseball teams (the one not called the Mets) is able to carry a payroll four times the size of a Caribbean nation’s GDP.

After eating my fair share of pizza in New York this summer, I think I know why I prefer their pizza (hint: it’s not water) The superior quality is due to a properly crispy, yet chewy, crust. New York pizzerias inherently understand that the key to a good pizza is a proper dough that’s been almost incinerated under high heat. If it’s not a wood-fired oven, it’s a massive gas-burning oven that can reach temperatures of 800-900 degrees and can crisp up a pie in minutes.

This is why a pizza cooked at home is never as good as one we buy from a pizzeria; our ovens just aren’t hot enough. A new oven especially can’t get hot enough, the top temperature is 450-500 degrees (you can go higher, but your oven might start shaking as if possessed). That’s why a pizza stone is imperative if you want to make pizza at home. It’ll boost the temperature of the oven by an extra 200 degrees or so and will assist in properly crisping up your pizza. Even with a stone though, the stone will only get up to 700-degrees, which is far short of the 800-900 degrees a restaurant’s pizza oven can get to. This will lead to a puffed-up, bread-like pizza.

The best way to cook a pizza at home is to use an old gas oven with a pizza stone. If you pump up an old gas oven to it’s highest setting, then it’ll get to 700 degrees. With a pizza stone, you can get close to the temperature a pizza oven can get to. This will lead to a crisper, flatter crust.

If you don’t have an old, gas oven, then your best bet at cooking a pizza is grilling one. Over indirect heat, the dough will crisp up well. And you get the flavor of grilling in your pizza, which is never a bad thing. The disadvantage to this is that it requires you to set up a grill every time you want to make a pizza, and that’s not possible. More often than not, I’ll pan-fry a steak. With that in mind, I decided to “grill” pizzas using Fissler’s Crispy Steelux grill pan. This is really the only way that I can get the extremely high heat to cook the pizza dough without dragging out the grill or building a wood oven in my back yard (a friend of mine actually did that. He spent two months building a gas oven, made a few pizzas, then let the whole thing fall apart under neglect. It was sad)

I decided to use Mario Batali’s pizza dough recipe because he actually has a restaurant in New York dedicated to pizza cooked in a pan. Theoretically, Fissler’s grill pan should work as well, if not better because it has a higher peak temperature and the raised edges allow circulation underneath.

After making this recipe, I should note that the quality of wine you use is actually important. The wine flavor is pronounced in the dough and I wish I used a better quality than the $3 Charles Shaw I got at Trader Joe’s. Also, I'd use a pinch more salt than what the recipe called for. Honestly, if I could do this again, I’d just stick to a basic pizza dough recipe (flour, yeast, sugar, water and salt).

The first pizza I made with Fissler’s grill pan was a basic margherita pizza. It was overcooked because the pan got TOO hot. Within 30 seconds, there were burnt bits everywhere. The raised edges also meant that the part of the dough not in contact with the pan didn’t have enough time to develop any color. You essentially had a black-and-white pizza.

I turned to heat down to medium for subsequent attempts and it worked a lot better with the next pizza.

It only takes about 45 seconds to cook one side of the crust. Then you flip it over, top it, cover the pan and cook for another minute or so. There you go, pizza in less than 3 minutes. In less than an hour, I was able to turn out six pizzas.

This ended up being my favorite. It’s a pizza capricciosa (“capricious” pizza), which has mozzarella, tomato sauce, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, tomatoes, olives and olive oil. I added prosciutto and a hard-boiled egg, which is how the Romans eat one of the few pizzas that Italians load with ingredients.

I wish I got more color on the crusts. But the crusts were properly crispy and chewy at the same time. No, it’s not as good as a good slice of pizza from New York. But this is infinitely more convenient and economical. Even the Rangers can knock off the Yankees with less resources sometimes.

A different kind of grilled cheese sandwich

I picked up a pack of Yanni grilling cheese the other day, made by Karoun Dairies. It's their version of Mediterranean Halloumi cheese, which has the unusual property of not melting at high temperatures. Instead it develops a browned crust making it great for cooking on the grill, or in a grill pan, like the Fissler Crispy Steelux. Wow: it came out great. I cut a slice about one fourth of an inch thick. It has a high enough fat content that you don't need to add fat to the pan. Just heat the pan on a high flame until a drop of water bounces and bubbles in the pan, lay down the slice of cheese, lower the heat to medium and cook until browned (this only takes about a minute). Flip it over by carefully getting a metal turner under the cheese, without disturbing the browned crust. Then allow the other side to brown for about a minute. As you can see from the photo, I ate it with tabbouleh salad, half an avocado and whole wheat pita. So easy and delicious. For extra "cheese" put on a Yanni CD while eating.