Chiffa-wha? Chiffonade. It’s a fancy name for cutting herbs or other greens into long, thin strips. It’s literal French translation is “made of rags”. Sounds appetizing, right? Even so, it’s a nice little technique to have in your back pocket.

I mostly use chiffonade for basil (do chiffonade? make chiffonade? I’m not sure the right verbage here). It is nice for bruschetta, caprese salads, pasta, etc. I like it because it makes the basil smaller so it gets distributed better. And it looks pretty. Besides sometimes you need a dash of fancy in your life.

How to make chiffonade of basil

1. Stack your basil leaves. Put the bigger leaves on the bottom and smaller leaves on top. I’m using 5 leaves here, but you can do this with as many as you are comfortable working with.

2. Starting at the tip (non-stem end), roll the leaves

until you have a little cigar of basil leaves.

3. Hold the cigar down on your cutting board and cut thin slices from one end. Go as slow as you need to.

Keep cutting slices…

Until you reach the end of your cigar.

4. Voilá! Chiffonade. Now go fancify your dinner.

If it weren’t for cleaning out the inside of a pumpkin, I think I would cook with them more often. It takes me forever to scrape out all of the stringy stuff inside. This has made me lazy and I mostly use canned now. But we bought a few pumpkins for Hallloween decorations, and never carved them, so they have been sitting there taunting me… (I’m not sure how to cook big pumpkins though, I’ve only cooked with small sugar pumpkins – anyone have suggestions?).

Tonight I decided to go for it. Just cut the top off of a sugar pumpkin and dove in. I made a rendition of Ruth Riechl’s pumpkin “soup” or gratin or whatever you want to call it (it doesn’t really resemble soup, at least not the way I made it. Tasty though. Then again most things are tasty with enough melted cheese).

There I was cleaning out the pumpkin with a spoon and getting really annoyed with all the stringy innards. I nearly gave up, but instead went on a hunt for something better. I’m sure I am not the first person to do this, but I found that an ice cream scoop worked better than anything else I tried. It made short work of the rest of the pumpkin guts and I was happy to be moving on to the fun part of baking the pumpkin and toasting the seeds.

So there you have it: ice cream scoops, not just for ice cream…

I finally had time today to go on my quest for the Holy Grail of pie crust: leaf lard. While I did not find leaf lard specifically, I came home with two different lards (is lards a word?).

First things first… What is lard?

Main Entry: lard
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin lardum, laridum; perhaps akin to Greek larinos fat
Date: 14th century

: a soft white solid or semisolid fat obtained by rendering fatty pork

- from Merriam-Webster

And what is leaf lard?
Leaf lard is the highest quality lard. It comes from around a pig’s kidneys. According to Wikipedia, “[it] has little pork flavor, making it ideal for use in baked goods, where it is treasured for its ability to produce flaky, moist pie crusts.”

Okay, fine. So that’s the point, right? Pie crust. I remember the episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown smuggles lard out of the grocery store for use in his pie crust (by the way, he uses the green and white box). Still, I wonder what makes it so much better than vegetable shortening?

Anyway, I set out this morning on my lard quest. I knew if all else failed I could pick up some of the shelf-stable Mexican lard I have seen in the mercados, but first I wanted to try to find something fresher… and preferably leaf lard. I thought of a few places that had nice meat departments or butcher shops, thinking they might have lard (rendered or not).

My first stop was Andronico’s. When I asked the butcher if he had any lard, he told me it was on aisle 9 in a green and white box. Mexican lard. As I turned toward aisle 9, he asked “You making tamales?”. I looked back and said “Actually, it’s for pie crust.” Surprise flickered across his face and he said “Well, now I want some pie.”

I’m not sure exactly what kind of lard is in the green and white box, but I bought it anyway just in case my next stop was unfruitful.

I drove a little further to Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats. It is a German butcher shop that makes great sausages. I saw on a forum (maybe Chowhound?) that someone recommended checking with German butchers for leaf lard… and so I did. Anyway, what I found there was rendered lard in a small tub in their refrigerated case. It’s German name is schmalz… umm? Ick. Not that lard is a pretty word, but schmalz?

Schmalz or no, I was on a mission, so I bought it. When I got home, I started to measure ingredients for a pie crust, but when I opened the lard, I couldn’t bring myself to use it. Partly because it wasn’t chilled (and all of the fats in your pie crust need to be chilled). And partly because the tub of schmalz from Dittmer’s was a little goopey in its unchilled state and smelled porky. Which I guess should be expected as it is rendered pork fat. But I found the smell unpleasant today (this from a girl who uses bacon fat instead of butter or olive oil to cook with just because it’s pork fat and adds flavor to whatever I’m cooking. I can’t explain why the lard gave me the heeby-jeebies).

I decided to put the lard into the refrigerator so we could both chill a bit. And instead made a pie crust using vodka, as mentioned by Evie in the comments of the pie crust (part 1). I haven’t baked it yet though, that I’m afraid will have to wait until tomorrow. And maybe I will find the guts to use some of the lard by then too…

In the meantime, here is a little more about lard:

• Rendering lard – Stop motion video from Not Without Salt. This post also includes a list of links to other methods to render lard.
• leaf lard – Art of Pie (Kate McDermott)

Wednesday’s post on how to make your own brown sugar sparked more interest than I expected. And a few questions came up in the comments, so I decided to try to answer them in a post. Here is a summary of what I learned about molasses plus a few more recipes that use molasses.

Molasses is a byproduct of sugar production, whether from sugar cane or sugar beets. Until after the end of World War I, it was the main sweetener used in the U.S. because refined sugar was too expensive for most Americans to buy regularly. By 1919, the consumption of white sugar had doubled since 1880 due to a drastic price drop of refined sugar. These days molasses costs about twice as much as refined sugars.

• What is the difference between molasses and treacle?

This one is still not completely clear to me (maybe I should go find treacle and do a taste test), but according to About.com:

A pale, refined molasses, [treacle] is notably sweeter and has a much more mellow flavor than molasses. Nowadays, treacle is a blend of molasses and refinery syrup.
…
British treacle can be substituted for molasses in most recipes, but much less frequently will molasses work as a replacement for treacle.

• Aside from making brown sugar, what is molasses good for?

Brit, that is a great question. In the interest of full disclosure I feel I should tell you that I don’t use a lot of molasses. I make gingerbread for the holidays. And in the summer, I use it in barbecue sauce. But it keeps for a long time (years) so I always keep a little in the pantry.
I posed the question to the food community on Twitter and only got two responses. I’m not sure if that reflects more on the (lack of) popularity of molasses or of me, but Jacquie H. said homemade barbecue sauce and Janice Ray uses molasses for a deep, dark ginger cake. So from my sample of two, I seem to be about average in my use of the dark stuff.

I dug a little deeper and found out these interesting tidbits:

Unlike refined sugars, it contains significant amounts of vitamins and minerals. Blackstrap molasses is a source of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and iron; one tablespoon provides up to 20% of the daily value of each of those nutrients.

… and…

In Australia, molasses is fermented to produce ethanol for use as an alternative fuel in motor vehicles, and is also used to treat burns.

- from Wikipedia

So it’s healthy, can be used in your garden and to feed your livestock (if you have any), and in Australia is turned into an alternative fuel. I also read on Wikipedia that it can be used to remove rust. Hmm.

A few more recipes using molasses:

• A list of Molasses Recipes on About.com including bread, beans, as well as the standard barbecue sauce and gingerbread.
• Quick whole wheat and molasses bread from Mark Bittman
• A treasure trove of molasses recipes from 101 Cookbooks

Well, I’m not sure I really answered your questions, but I learned a little about molasses. And now I’m craving gingerbread.

References:

• Black treacle/molasses expiration on Chowhound
• Molasses History
• What is British Treacle? on O Chef