The students dived into the task, peeling and chopping the potatoes. Everyone except Terri held their knives correctly. “Oh, hey, do you want me to show you how to hold a knife again?” I asked her.
“No, I just prefer to hold it this way, but thanks,” she said, with a choke hold on the end of the knife. Huh, I thought. I didn't have much experience teaching. Should I force her to do it my way? I decided to let it go.
Soon a rhythmic chopping and light banter filled the room. Lauri demonstrated how to cut a leek, chopping off the hard dark-green ends and then the stubby root. She cut the light green and white portions lengthwise (sticks) and then diced them (cubes). “Leeks sometimes trap dirt between their layers,” she advised. “So once they're chopped up, we're going to toss them in a big bowl of water to clean them off.”
The potatoes and leeks were destined for a classic
potage parmentier,
potato and leek soup. “Basically, it's always the same,” Lauri said. “We're going to sauté the rinsed leeks in some butter and olive oil. Once the leeks soften, we'll toss in potatoes and chicken stock. Once they're soft, we'll puree them and stir in some cream.”
“That's it?” Shannon asked.
Lauri nodded. “That's it. You could do a variation of it with almost anything. You could use leeks and asparagus, or onions and broccoli, shallots and cauliflower, onions and carrots. It's just a simple formula. If you've got kids who think they don't like vegetables, I've found they often will eat them when they're made into soup. They'll also eat more vegetables in the form of a soup than they would raw. It's easier for them to eat and digest.”
We went through the basics of other common ways to cook vegetables. The volunteers chopped up cauliflower and Brussels sprouts and shoved them into one big collective pan with some olive oil to roast. We set up four portable burners on the worktable and paired the students together to sauté Swiss chard and diced potatoes. The room turned lively. Pans clanked, oil sizzled, people laughed or shrieked, as the smells of the vegetables erupted around the table.
On Gen and Sabra's corner, some potatoes escaped as they shook the pan. “Watch out, we're flying potatoes over here!”
Trish fretted at first. “Am I doing this right?” she asked tentatively as Lauri checked her status sautéing potatoes. “I don't usually cook over high heat.”
“Looks perfect to me,” Lauri said. Trish seemed pleased with herself.
I brought in my electric steamer. “This sounds cheesy, but it's one of the few things I leave on my counter. Simply add some water, pile in some vegetables, and turn on the timer. It's hands-off; you can forget about them until the timer dings. They never overcook and pretty much any vegetable can be steamed.” I threw in baby artichokes and small cobs of corn.
Then Lauri explained what Julia Child called “cooking vegetables the French way.” The method aims to keep the color and bite of vegetables such as asparagus, broccoli, green beans, and peas. We brought a pot of water to a boil on one of the portable burners. I set a bowl of ice water next to it.
“Briefly cook the vegetables in the boiling water until they're softened but still a little firm,” Lauri said, dropping a handful of green beans into the pot. After a couple minutes, she pulled them out with a slotted spoon. “Then plunge them into the ice water. Actually, cold tap water is fine, too. It slows the cooking process, and it keeps the chlorophyll intact. When you keep boiling them, the chlorophyll evaporates and you get . . .”
“The gray vegetables that my mother used to serve,” Trish said.
“Exactly,” Lauri replied. She offered a green bean to everyone around the table.
“These are nice, crisp, and so green,” Trish said. “So fresh tasting. If my mother would have served me these, I might have thought I liked vegetables growing up.”
Done with the vegetables for now, we shifted from cooking to tasting.
I said, “Okay, all this stuff you see laid out around the room? We're going to taste all of them. There is no right or wrong. Just taste each ingredient and write down your impressions. Compare all the olive oils to one another, then the chicken stock, and so on.”
At first, people were tentative. A light dip here, a scribble there, but no talking. Then came a chorus of “I don't know if this right” and “I don't know what I'm supposed to taste” and “This just tastes like salt.”
After fifteen minutes, they grew bolder. They started to compare notes. The room grew louder, busy with voices. “Did you like number six in the olive oils? No? Me neither.” “Didn't that chicken stock taste odd?” “Yeah, I thought so, too.”
People dodged from the nine types of olive oil to the eight types of chicken stock to the twelve cans of tomatoes, comparing notes. The salt was the hardest, and in retrospect we overdid it by offering nine varieties: standard table salt, kosher salt, sea salt, Himalayan pink salt, French gray sea salt,
fleur de sel,
black salt, and salt substitute, plus a handcrafted sea salt made from Puget Sound water. The salt tasting led to a lot of water drinking and spitting.
At one point, Shannon sat down. “I'm just seriously overwhelmed,” she said. “I don't know if I can taste anymore.”
We passed around an “aroma wheel,” a multicolored circle designed to help wine drinkers articulate what they experience when tasting wine. Soon the students were consulting it after various tastes. This changed the discussions. “That stock was kind of yeasty, don't you think?” “I found those tomatoes astringent.” “I'm definitely getting something metallic in this salt.”
Then we unveiled what had been tasted and compared notes.
We started with the salt. The expensive artisan salt made from Puget Sound water won best flavor overall. In second, a gray
sel gris
that a friend had brought back from France. The inexpensive coarse kosher salt was deemed “exactly what I think salt should taste like,” Andra said. Collectively, the group disliked two of them. First was the salt labeled “E.”
Everyone thought it tasted odd. “It's just got a strange taste,” Jodi said. “It's harsh and like a chemical.”
“It tastes too salty but also kind of like metal,” Sabra said.
The dreaded E turned out to be standard iodized table salt.
“Oh, that stuff is awful,” Shannon said, shaking her head. “I am not using that anymore. I had no idea that salts could taste so different.”
The other loathed salt was option D, which most of them referred to as harsh and bitter. Lisa developed a chemical burn on her tongue after tasting it. “What I think a car battery would taste like,” someone wrote.
“The weird thing is that it doesn't really taste like salt at all,” said Gen, the young woman with roommates. She'd been relatively quiet up to that point. “It's like fake salt.” The culprit: salt substitute.
“I would not have believed this if I had not seen it for myself, but let me read this line on the label,” Lisa said. “Consult a doctor before using this product.”
Next we looked at the winners in the canned-tomato taste test. Both Hunt's and Cento scored high. “Those two actually taste like tomatoes,” Cheryl said. “They're kind of sweet, but not so salty.”
“I'm so relieved,” Lauri whispered into my ear. “I used to use Cento tomatoes in my restaurant. I was worried they wouldn't be any good.”
The biggest loser was also the most expensive, a brand of San Marzano tomatoes from Italy. I didn't like them either after a direct comparison to the others. “It's like they had a slightly sour flavor that left a strange aftertaste,” Shannon said.
In the olive oil category, the winner was the delicate flavor of an expensive Italian extra virgin olive oil. “Fruity, subtle,” Cheryl said, reading her notes.
“Very delicate, not overly oily,” Trish said.
“It's like white grapes,” Gen said. “Almost a little bit like honey.” Lauri and I looked at each other. We tasted it again. Now that she mentioned it, we picked those flavors up, too.
Olive oil is made by pressing olives to extract their natural oil. The first time olives are processed for oil is known as “extra virgin” and accounts for about 10 percent of all the olive oil produced. Each subsequent pressing extracts less flavor, from “extra” to “pure” to just plain olive oil.
“Use extra-virgin olive oil in something uncooked, like a salad dressing,” Lauri said. “It's better to buy good oils in small quantities. People think that oil lasts forever, but it has a shelf life of six months. Keep it in a cool, dark place and
not
next to or above your stove! Heat breaks it down.”
“You can use a less expensive kind of olive or vegetable oil for everyday cooking. If you use that a lot, then you can get a bigger size.”
Unfortunately, the bulk olive oil that I had bought for class was unpopular. “It just tastes oily and bland,” Dri said. “Funny, I have this kind at home and I never realized that I don't like it. I have a lot of it, too.”
The Parmesan cheese comparison required a brief education. “The real deal is called Parmigiano-Reggiano,” explained Lisa, who had done this spiel a million times at her mom's cheese shop. “It's kind of like champagne. You can't call it Parmigiano-Reggiano unless it's from one of five provinces in Italy. To get the name, the cheese makers have to follow very strict guidelines. So that's why everything else is Parmesan.”
The difference extends beyond the name. Commercially produced Parmesan is aged a shorter time and due to its production methods can contain up to 70 percent more sodium than the Italian variety. Most of the Parmesan found in supermarkets is mechanically processed to wrest out extra moisture, which extends its shelf life.
The winner in the category was an aromatic wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano from Lisa's mother's shop. Shavings of it were stacked up against the pale slices of an American brand and three versions of grated cheese, including the familiar canned variety. Results went as expected.
“This tastes like soap,” Sabra said of the exact brand of cheese she had used on her White Trash Garlic Bread. “But this stuff, it rocks,” she said, picking up another slice of the Italian cheese.
“The thing about something like Parmigiano-Reggiano is that, yeah, it's more expensive to buy a piece of that,” Lisa said. “But it has so much more flavor that a little goes a long way. In the end, you'll use less, so it's a better value than you think.”
We concluded by tasting the various chicken stocks.
“I always just thought chicken stock was chicken stock,” Shannon said, verbalizing what several had murmured during the class. “There's so much difference, it's amazing.” Dri described one as a “salt lick.” Others were not “chicken-y.”
One had a strange flavor. “It's like how orange juice is so orange-y,” Gen said. “It's almost as if it is chicken stock made from concentrate. It's also weirdly salty.” That one turned out to be stock made from a bouillon cube.
Only one person favored my lovingly handcrafted homemade stock. “It's nice and chicken-y, and it has a good body to it, but it's bland,” Trish said.
As usual, I hadn't added any salt to it. They were comparing unsalted homemade stock against mostly heavily salted prepared stocks, some of which had more than a third of an adult's daily sodium intake in one cup. Swanson and Pacific got the thumbs-up, and after a dose of salt was added to the homemade stock, the group preferred that one, too.
“I guess the thing is that after tasting them all, I'd only buy ones with lower sodium,” said Trish, her taste buds sensitive to salt because she avoided it. “I use one of these brands and, my goodness! I never realized just how
salty
it was until I actually tasted it here tonight.”
Everyone nodded. “One thing to remember, you can always add salt, but you can't take it out,” I said. “This is also why you should taste things before you cook with them. Taste the olive oil you're using before making a dressing. Sample a bit of the cheese before you add it to pasta. Try a bit of that chicken stock before you put it into a soup.”
With that, Lauri and Lisa unveiled the final test of the night. In the middle of the table sat five bowls of leek and potato soup. Three were the newly crafted
potage parmentier
split into different bowls, one with no salt, one mightily oversalted, and the final bowl seasoned to Lauri's taste. The other two bowls also contained leek and potato soup, one from a condensed-soup can while the other was an expensive dehydrated “gourmet” version.
“Select the one you think tastes best,” Lauri challenged. Everyone selected the moderately seasoned soup. “What's wrong with soup A?” she asked. Too much salt, everyone agreed. “What's wrong with D?” Not enough salt, the group said. “So now when you see a recipe that says âSalt to taste,' that's all it means. If it doesn't have enough salt, like D, then add some. Just make it taste good to you.”
The group pondered the remaining two bowls.
“Ugh, I can taste the iodized salt in both of these,” Jodi said.
“Yeah, how weird, me, too,” Shannon replied.
The canned soup generated a range of intriguing descriptions: “strange mouthfeel,” “feels fatty on the back of my tongue,” “strange aftertaste,” “not particularly leek-y or potato-y,” and just plain “yuck.” The dehydrated version fared better, but was still described as “too salty,” “tastes like chemicals,” “odd spices,” andâmy favoriteâ“kind of like a bowl of liquid blah.”
As she took off her apron, Jodi quietly admitted to Shannon that she had a case of the canned soup back at home. “If I had known it was so easy to make, I wouldn't have bought it, you know?”