Creamy Tagliatelle with Porcini

Over the Christmas period, I was rustling around my mum's collection of cookbooks and stumbled across this recipe, courtesy of the River Cafe. For anyone familiar with the place, they excel at doing vibrant italian dishes with exceptionally good ingedients and no shortage of skill. That said, I quite deliberately picked this recipe because of its technical simplicity - it's basically pasta with mushrooms. To assume however, that that means it tastes bland or ordinary, would be foolish. I'm not going to suggest even for a second that what I produced is anything near the quality of what you'd get in the restaurant (which is worth a visit even if only to try their ultimate dessert, the Chocolate Nemesis), but it will give any home-cooked pasta dish a run for its money and then some.

The key ingredient here, as you will have noticed from the title, is porcini mushrooms. These little dudes are a staple of rustic italian cuisine, so much so that they even have festivals celebrating it. Called sagras, these gatherings are quintessentially family affairs where towns, villages and communities typically get together to eat and be merry, often soundtracked by some 70's eurovision reject in a tanktop and silly hair. The sagras aren't limited to mushrooms either - steak, cheese, tomatoes, even focaccia get their own sagra. When it comes to food, Italians have a whole lot to celebrate.

Thankfully porcinis, also known as ceps, have become pretty easy to find in the UK now since they can be dried and stored away. You can find them in any italian deli or even Waitrose, and while they can be pricey, they deliver value in flavour. When choosing them, try to get lighter creamy looking ones, and avoid ones that are very dark and crumbly. For the most part a decent pack of porcinis will provide you with enough for a couple of meals, or one seriously packed one.

This recipe throws in a couple of extra little twists in the shape of the chilli and the lemon, which I've increasingly found are hidden stars when it comes to pasta dishes. Particularly when combined with seafood, they create a wonderfully lively combination of flavours. The nice thing of course is that you can adjust the heat to whatever your taste, though I'm a firm believer in even a little bit of spice being a crucial element in this dish.

Creamy Tagliatelle with Porcini Mushrooms
Serves 2

50g butter
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes (this will make it pretty spicy, half it if you don't like heat)
10 leaves fresh sage, rinsed, roughly chopped
35g dried Porcini mushrooms
Rind of 1 lemon, peeled (see my note below)
50ml double cream
sea salt and black pepper
Fresh egg tagliatelle, 4-5 baskets per person
Parmesan, freshly grated
4 ice cubes of veal stock (optional, see my blog post about veal stock)

First off, grab your porcinis and dunk them into 250ml of hot water. Just leave them to soak for about 15 to 20 minutes, occasionally just poking them to make sure all the mushrooms are fully soaking.

Peel the lemon rind with a vegetable peeler. The original recipe says to cut the rind into thin strips, but personally, I found that while that did give a lovely flavour, the texture of the rind eventually interfered too much with the dish for me. Personally, I think zest would work absolutely fine and be far less intrusive.

Drain the porcinis, rinse them quickly under the tap and then roughly chop them up. The soaking liquid is gold dust and packed with flavour, however it will have bits of silt and other stuff in there so strain the liquid through a strainer with a cloth in it. Any cloth or muslin will do. Keep the strained liquid to one side.

Put a pan of water on to boil for your pasta. Grab the butter and some olive oil and melt it over medium flame until the foaming settles down.

Lower the heat a little bit and throw in the garlic, sage and chilli. Keep it moving and cook for about 5 minutes or so until it starts to colour.

Throw in the porcini mushrooms and saute them for several minutes until any liquid has evaporated and they're nicely softened.

Add the soaking liquid, and simmer until nearly all the liquid has been re-absorbed by the mushrooms. Now, if you read my last blog post, you might have some lovely veal stock ice cubes stored up in the freezer. This right here is a perfect time to whip them out and drop them straight into the pan.

Again, let the whole thing simmer for a few minutes until it's reduced. You're looking for a lovely dark sauce just nestling around the mushrooms. Once you're happy with it, throw in the cream and the lemon. Again, let it reduce until you get a lovely creamy consistency, as below:

Season the sauce to taste, and reduce the heat to lowest possible setting. Cook the tagliatelle in heavily salted water for 1 minute less than suggested by the packaging (this is a habit of mine), unless it's fresh pasta in which case it's only 3-4 minutes anyway. Reserve some pasta water in a cup or jug (always do this with any pasta sauce), and drain the pasta. Toss it into the sauce, turning it to get every ribbon nicely coated in the sauce. The sauce will often thicken, so add a little pasta water to keep it from getting too claggy. You should be left with a perfectly creamy consistency on the sauce and everything nicely covered.

Get the pasta into warm bowls (tongs are perfect for this), and sprinkle with freshly grated parmesan and cracked black pepper. Tuck in.

The Revelation of Veal Stock

Veal stock is one of those things that I used to read about and just think "god that all sounds like hard work."

I'd see it in cookbooks, hear about it on Heston's cooking shows, and generally encounter it on websites that seemed to assume you had all the time in the world to bother with things like this. And at no point did I appreciate why they were all raving about it.

(C) Michael Ruhlman

Then, at the end of last year I had some time free over the christmas holidays and decided to just give it a try, because hey, who doesn't like roasting animal bones for fun? My girlfriend often comments on how obsessed I get with little projects, and this was no different: I read through a bunch of different recipes and blogs to get the gist of the process, and more importantly, understand just why veal bones is seen as the valhalla of stocks. I started with Michael Ruhlman's recipe (pictured right), then adjusted for some of the tips in Anthony Bourdain's recipe, and then just generally listened to tips from various internet resources. As long as you get the general steps right, the rest you can adjust to make your life easier.

It's important to stress right at the beginning that what veal stock brings to the table is quite subtle. It is not suddenly going to transform a sorry, limp sauce into something restaurant-quality. It's not a crutch or some wonder-cure for all occasions. What it does do, however, is add a lovely texture and depth to an already decent sauce, and provide that extra little element that will make your sauces taste even better. It can propel a decent pasta ragu into something that reminds you of a restaurant meal. It will make your own sauces surprise you. If that's something you're even remotely curious about, then read on.

First off: getting the bones. This is not as difficult as you might think. I went to my local butchers, and they were selling frozen veal bones for £2 per kilo. Now every butchers is different, so here are a couple of tips:

• If you can get the butcher to chop up the bones for you, ask them to cut them into 3" slices, for stock. Veal bones are often bigger than this, and the knuckle bone, which is the best for stock, is very big so try to get the butcher to cut them down to size for you. If the bones are frozen, like my butchers, they probably won't be able to do this, but don't worry about it - big bones are ok, smaller ones are just more convenient.
• If you have the space in the freezer, get a lot of bones. It's much easier to keep them at home rather than go back and forth everytime you make the stock. And once you've made it, you will almost definitely want to do it again.
• If you get frozen bones make sure they are completely defrosted before you start cooking.

Next thing is getting a big enough pot. To make stock you need to have a couple of inches of water over the bones, and if you've got larger bones this can be a bit of a problem. Ideally, you want a tall 10-litre stock pot or something similar, and you can find these for fairly cheap online as long as you only want to use them for making stock or soups. In my case, I just used my biggest le creuset casserole pot, which holds about 8 litres. You'll also need a strainer, a clean cloth, and a second pot.

So you've got the bones and you've got the pot? One last thing then: do this on a rainy day when you don't need to leave the house. It doesn't require a lot of attention, but it takes around 10 hours to do, so pick a sunday when you're lounging around the house and you're good to go. On to the recipe:

Sunday Roasted Veal Stock

1 kilo of veal bones, cut into smaller pieces if possible
Sunflower / Vegetable oil
Tomato Puree
1 white onion, medium diced
2 carrots, medium diced
2 bay leaves
2 cloves garlic
Black peppercorns, lightly crushed
Bunch of fresh parsley, coarsely chopped
Couple sprigs of fresh thyme
A whole lot of water

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C. Lightly oil all the veal bones and place them in a baking tray/roasting pan large enough so that they're not too crowded. Roast them for 30-45 minutes, turning once, until they are a lovely golden brown colour. Make sure not to burn them!!

Take the bones out of the oven, and smear tomato puree all over them (a silicon spatula is great for this). Shove the bones back in the oven for about 20 minutes, or until the tomato puree starts caramelizing and getting darker.

When they're ready and smell amazing, transfer the bones to your big pot. Chuck in the rest of the ingredients, and then cover with water. You want to make sure the bones are covered with at least a couple inches or so of COLD water, more if possible. Never, ever used hot water when making a stock as this will cause the stock to turn cloudy. Cold water ensures that all the fatty proteins forming in your lovely stock will rise to the top and be easier to skim off.

Heat the stock on a medium flame until it starts to simmer - do NOT boil your stock, ever. Again, this will make it fatty and cloudy, which we don't want! Once it's simmering, reduce the heat to the lowest possible flame, and let it reduce for 8 to 10 hours. Check on it every 45 minutes or so and skim off the fat and bits that have floated to the surface. Keep skimming, keep reducing.

Once you're ready, remove the bones, vegetables, and any other ingredients that are in there. Get a second pot and put a strainer with a cloth in it, like so:

Strain the stock as many times as you can stand - the more the better. I strained mine twice. At this point, you should be left with a lovely clean stock, something like this:

At this stage, you have a couple of options. You can cool the stock down and store it in the freezer for later use, or you can reduce it even more. I did both. I took a litre or so and separated into containers for use in bigger sauces:

The rest, I decided to reduce even further, towards something called demi-glace. This is basically just a fancy name for heavily reduced veal stock, combined with a reduction of red wine and shallots. I had a bottle of wine left open that we weren't going to drink, so I reduced the whole lot by half, and then added the remaining veal stock. I then simmered that for another hour or so, until it was lovely and dark and rich. I then strained that again to filter out any elements from the wine, cooled it, and poured it into ice cube trays:

This is a fantastic trick, from Julia Child I believe. You can pop out the ice cubes into a freezer/ziploc bag, and then whenever you're making a sauce, you can chuck in a couple of cubes of lovely veal stock to strengthen it. I now use this in several recipes, in fact the next recipe I'm writing up for you features it.

So after all that effort, you're probably still asking: why??? Well it's tricky to explain without tasting it for yourself, but essentially the gelatin from the veal bones gives an amazing velvety texture to sauces that flours or other thickening agents just can't match. The flavour from the bones and aromatics also fill in the blanks in a sauce, just making the whole thing stronger overall. If you've ever made a sauce that just seems to lack that final 'oomph', that bit of body that soothes the soul, then veal stock will help you on your way. It absolutely excels in any mushroom sauce, gravies, pasta ragu, or even just a quick dijon sauce for some roast chicken. It's pretty versatile, and a wonderfully handy thing to have in the kitchen. Make it once, and see for yourself.