Lees
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
"lees: the substance that is left at the bottom of a container of liquid, especially a container of wine or beer" Cambridge English Dictionary
I think this is going to be one of those bits and pieces posts - in this case the little things that have been lurking in my various ideas list waiting to be turned into gold. However, since lees is a food - well drink related thing - maybe it will turn into a mini treatise on lees. We'll see.
This is a photograph of champagne resting on its lees - a vital part of the process in making champagne. So what are the lees and why are they important? Well according to Seven Fifty Daily:
"The lees themselves are a natural by-product of the winemaking process, a mix of spent yeast cells, material from the grapes’ skins, and other detritus that settles in the fermentation vessel when that process is complete."
I confess that as I read the article my eyes began to glaze over when it got into "yeast autolysis, ... polysaccharides, glucans, mannoproteins, and chitin." So I suggest that if you really want to know about all of that you read the article. I know that's very lazy of me, but my aging brain is just not up to it.
Suffice to say that the lees are vital to various wine and other alcoholic drink processes, but the lees of the kind that gather in the bottom of the bottle after a long time in the bottle are not so great, and require filtering out. So I'm going with the filtering out process and getting rid of some small ideas in my Ideas notebook. 'Scraping the bottom of the barrel' - which must surely have something to do with lees as well.
A Postscript
Re yesterday's post on 'Marry me' chicken which led into Tuscan chicken and the whole Italian/Italian-American authenticity thing, I should have said, that at least the'Marry me' chicken was not claiming any Tuscan or any kind of other regional Italian origins. It was simply a recipe writer's creation - even if she did base it on her original Tuscan chicken pasta, and nearly called it Sicilian chicken skillet. It was the Tuscan chicken which was dodgier - naming wise. But I bet both are absolutely delicious and I aim to cook one or other of them - maybe both - some time soon, although I'm married already - and have been for decades!
Did you know that the Italian fascists hated pasta? Why would any Italian hate pasta one wonders? Well according to Emiko Davis who has written in her substack newsletter:
"Historically speaking, pasta was demonised by Mussolini and the Fascists, who claimed it was unsuitable for good, strong soldiers and that was even unpatriotic (as the wheat was imported)."
And so when Mussolini was thrown out and executed in 1943 the Cervi family in the small town of Campegine, on July 25th - the day after:
"offered their entire town a celebratory meal of 370 kilos (815 pounds) of pasta dressed in butter and parmesan cheese, simple ingredients but ones that can only be described as pure luxury in the middle of the Second World war."
They did this by gathering local farmer's stockpiles of flour, buying cheese and butter on credit from the local dairy and getting the help of the baker's pasta machine and the use of his ovens to dry it out. They then cooked the pasta - at home and in the dairy and served it to everyone in the town's piazza. Thus to this day July 25th is celebrated with lots of pasta events. Alas the story did not end well because when fascism came back the head of the family and his seven sons were arrested, and the sons executed. Which I guess makes it all even more worth remembering with this absolutely delicious but basic pasta - there is a recipe in the newsletter.
Two waste not ideas from Tom Hunt
Excess cream into mascarpone by excess he means excess cream that is almost beginning to turn - with the warning that if there is mould it's too late. It's extremely simple - you just heat the cream with some lemon juice, cool, strain, drain in the fridge for at least 8 hours and then store in a jar for a few days. Or just use it straightaway.
Spent espresso barbecue sauce I guess this is really just a recipe for a barbecue sauce but the addition of the coffee grounds - "to add serious depth of flavour and further complexity to the sauce" - is the pull here. The sauce is shown in the picture above in a recipe for 'Venezuelan corn cake arepas with “pulled” oyster mushrooms and this sweet, umami-rich and intense barbecue sauce, all topped with a refreshing kohlrabi and mango salsa.' although the recipe for all of that is not online. You'll have to buy his book Eating for Pleasure, People and Planet.
Barbecue sauce tips - Whilst we are on barbecue sauce - well I guess it's almost barbecue weather - if you rug up well - Anna Berrill of The Guardian has a whole range of tips and explanations from various chefs, and as well as their general tips there are several suggestions/recipes for actual sauces, and what they are best for.
Many chutney brown sauce
Still in the same kind of area we have Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his book Love Your Leftovers (one of my all-time favourite cookbooks) crediting his colleague Gill Meller with this simple idea for the occasion when:
"If you like to make chutney and/or you have friends who like to make chutney ... then you may find that your fridge accumulates more half-full jars of interesting, spiced and fruited preserves than you can shake a spoon at."
And currently I have a couple at least, plus a few other similar things. I came across this the other day when I was browsing the book looking to see if he had tackled the Chinese lettuce omelette thing. (No he hadn't.) What you do is empty your jars into a saucepan, mix and add some boiling water to the right consistency for your imitation HP sauce. Boil for around ten minutes and then adjust the taste by adding things like vinegar and sugar, salt and pepper. Purée, boil again for 5 minutes and pour into sterilised bottles. It will keep for up to a year - which is just as well because it too, will probably then become one of those things you have to use up. Worth a try though.
Coconut aminos
Yotam Ottolenghi must have an occasional column in which he answers reader's questions. This reader - a vegetarian allergic to soy and soy products such as soy sauce, miso and tamari - the umami boosters of today - asked for suggested substitutes and this was one answer - coconut aminos.
The Spruce Eats tells us what it is - as you can see in the picture above - "a liquid condiment similar to soy sauce but made from the fermented sap of a coconut palm tree and sea salt." and, alas for our enquirer considerably more costly than soy sauce. Probably much more difficult to find as well. Ottolenghi did have other suggestions though - balsamic vinegar, tamarind, molasses - pomegranate and date in particular - black garlic (expensive), dried mushrooms and seaweed - and guess what? - marmite - well vegemite here. So I think coconut aminos is not going to appear on our supermarket shelves any time soon.
The Guardian's Ruby Tandoh tells us that reheating food is her 'thing' - the thing that she is really good at and she has plenty of suggestions - that mostly do not involve the microwave. Take pizza for example, which I confess I just reheat in the oven which makes it a bit too crispy and dry. No - what you have to do is:
"The cheese has already browned, the sauce has sunk down into the base, the last thing it needs is the dry heat of the oven or the air fryer. Instead, I crisp the base aggressively in a hot, dry pan, then give a benedictory sprinkle of water, turn the heat down and put on a lid until the cheese is molten soft."
There are lots of interesting ideas in her article - like this:
"Accept that things must change. Lasagne ascends to a higher plane if, instead of reheating a slab of it whole, you do the unthinkable and separate it into layers and then do the hard-pan-fry-and-steam combo. I dare you."
And final words:
"This is what we get wrong about reheating: we think that it is just about warming cooked things up, when it is, in fact, about cooking cooked things anew. You’re starting from a completely different point, with ingredients that chemically, have been irreversibly transformed by the first cook. But lean into this and you have the chance to exercise that same workaday ingenuity as an uncle making spice racks from old floorboards. This work can be creative and meticulous. It can be fun."
Maybe there is a fuller piece to write about the reheating thing sometime.
Two recipes to end with.
Fennel and dukkah farinata - from Ottolenghi.
Farinata is a flatbread from the south of France, specifically Nice, sometimes called socca. It's made from chickpea (gram) flour which gives it a different taste. I made some once - but a plain version. This one is from the Ottolenghi crew and is therefore a bit special in that:
"We've added shaved fennel and dukkah to the batter, and a quick-pickled fennel salad alongside to keep things fresh."
Simple, but interestingly different. I found it in his newsletter about picnic food.
At the other end of the foodie world spectrum in the Coles Magazine, Sarah Hobbs, their Food Director gives us a cross between lasagne and those stuffed rigatoni dishes in which the rigatoni stand upright - which is what Sarah Hobbs has done with lasagne sheets - stuffed with a bolognese kind of sauce. In many ways it's more complicated than some of Ottolenghi's current dishes, and it's ingenious as well. I once made the rigatoni kind of thing which was very difficult. Much more difficult to stuff a tube than to roll a piece of pasta around some kind of filling. An idea, as well, that is almost infinitely variable. It's just one of eight, equally good looking recipes in a section called Global flavours, in this month's magazine, whose theme is world of flavour.
YEARS GONE BY
Julu 27
2023 - Coconut rice - so many ways
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2018 - So much seafood
2017 - Is gluten-free healthy?
2016 - Fibre and the human biome
This blog was less about Lees and more about everything else. Intrestingly the Lees at the bottom of the bottle become the Dregs that you are best to Leave! 😜
I like the idea of rolled lasagne. Also I found the bit about reheating food interesting. May try the reheating pasta way. Like you I just shove it in the oven covered in aluminium foil!!