At Ella’s Fine Food and Drink in Westerly, Chef Jeanie Roland has put together a menu full of subtle layers of flavor and unexpected combinations. Her goal in her classes is to break down the components of what seem like very complicated dishes so that we can recreate them at home in simple, easy ways. Tonight, we’ll be learning All About Apples, where she walks us through three different ways to prepare fall’s favorite fruit.
We start with an autumn soup that is being served downstairs as a special that week. But first, we’ve got to learn about some new ingredients. She holds up a wormy looking thing that’s about the size of a cantaloupe. “Has anyone ever cooked with celeriac before?” We shake our heads. “It’s a great ingredient,” she promises, and it’s not as scary as it looks. Celeriac, or celery root, tastes like celery without the bitterness, Chef Jeanie explains. She likes to use it in cole slaw for some added flavor, or make chips or a gratin out of it. As she’s chopping an onion that will be the base of the apple and celeriac soup, she gives us a pro tip: glide your knife gently through an onion, rather than pushing down hard and letting out all the juice. “The cell is built to hold flavor,” Chef Jeanie explains. “When you mash the onion when you chop it, you lose all the flavor.” As she cooks, servers bring us bowls of garnish that don’t have any soup inside – then someone comes out with a teapot, and starts pouring soup. It’s an impressive show. “This is a great make-ahead first course,” she says. “Imagine serving this at a dinner party.” The soup tastes like fall, but without the expected cinnamon and squash flavors of the season.
Next up: Double Apple Endive and Blue Cheese Salad with Toasted Hazelnut Vinaigrette. Sounds complicated, right? But it’s really just a combination of a few well chosen ingredients: endive, Granny Smith and Cortland apples, blue cheese and toasted hazelnuts, topped with one of the salad dressings Chef Jeanie makes from scratch for the restaurant. In this one, she uses balsamic vinegar, olive oil and hazlenut oil to complement the nuts on the salad. It takes just a minute or two in the blender to make, and the depth of flavor is something you never would have thought you could make with just a few ingredients in your home kitchen. Just like the soup, the salad is seasonal and unexpected. In any dish, she says, you want a balance of flavors: sweet, salty, bitter. Here, the sweetness of the apple pairs beautifully with the salty cheese and the bitter greens.
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