GLOSSARY

Eventide is an intersection for so many things: tradition and modernity, local and global, low tech and high tech, casual and elevated. We are constantly exploring the space between all of those things to discover new ways to make people happy in the restaurant, and over the past few years, we’ve landed on some cool tools, techniques, and ingredients that make things a little easier and more interesting. Here are a few that help our kitchen hum and could help you take on some of the recipes in this book.

EQUIPMENT

Bamboo steamer basket: Ubiquitous in Asian cooking, the bamboo steamer basket is a cylindrical, perforated vessel that gets filled with food, covered, and placed over boiling water to steam whatever is inside. They’re better and cheaper than microwaves; you should buy several. At Eventide, we use them for our family-style clambake, which is reproduced in the book as the Efficiency Apartment Clambake (this page). We recommend buying 12-inch baskets.

Cold smoking at home: We are all big fans of smoked seafood and use it a lot at our restaurants. There are many creative ways to do smoke at home, too, but here’s our method. You’ll need cool weather, something like a Weber grill and an A-maze-n smoker, which you can buy online. It’s a clever little unit made of perforated metal in the shape of a small maze. Fill the maze with wood chips or wood pellets, light one end, and put it under the grate on the opposite side of the grill from the food on top of the grate. The smoker will produce hours of consistent smoke with almost no heat. Check out our recipes for smoked seafood on this page and this page.

Fine-mesh strainer: This kitchen tool allows for straining out impurities from stocks, broths, and sauces. Passing a puree or a sauce through a fine-mesh strainer results in a smoother, more refined preparation. You’ll see it all over this book, because as Thomas Keller says, “when in doubt, strain.”

Food dehydrator: A food dehydrator is an appliance that draws the moisture out of food and concentrates its flavor. We use it for a variety of garnishes and other ingredients, including the Daikon Bushi (this page) and Kalamata Olive Crumb (this page) preparations in this book. Excalibur is the high-end version that you can buy online, but you can also get a cheaper version from Nesco. An alternative to using a food dehydrator is as follows: turn your oven on to 350°F and let it run for a few minutes, then turn it off and leave the oven door slightly ajar for a couple of minutes. Place your ingredient in the oven on a baking sheet and close the door. Leave it for 8 hours or overnight and you should get a similar result.

Immersion circulator: This electrical appliance is attached to a tub of water to make sous vide (French for “under vacuum”) cooking possible. It heats the water to a precise temperature and can hold it there over long periods of time while circulating the water, allowing you to cook an ingredient uniformly and to an exact temperature. It basically gives you complete control in a way that no other cooking implement can. It’s used all over the restaurant world, from high-end restaurants to catering kitchens, and entrepreneurs have brought a lot of different home-use versions to market in recent years. We use an immersion circulator for a variety of things at Eventide, including very precise fish cookery, or for the eggs in our House Mayonnaise and its valuable spinoffs (this page). There’s really not an easy substitute for this cooking technique, although for fish or some proteins, lightly poaching in liquid can create somewhat similar outcomes.

Refractometer: We are proud of the unique flavored ices (this page) we serve as accoutrements with our shellfish program, and the name of the game for pulling them off is sugar content. Sugar is essential to making the ice easy to work with and giving it the right texture in the end. A refractometer is a tool often used in the culinary world to measure the sugar content (also known as the Brix level) of liquids, and while it’s not critical to have one in your home kitchen to pull of shaved ices, we make large enough amounts in the restaurant that it’s worth being able to measure things precisely. The sweet spot, no pun intended, is a Brix level of 14°. We don’t have a particular favorite brand, but there are quite a few available online.

Thermometers: There are quite a few recipes (particularly fried dishes) in this book that call for a digital instant read thermometer, which you can buy online, at some grocery stores, or at kitchen goods or hardware stores. We like the Thermapen brand, but any version will suffice.

INGREDIENTS

Barley koji: There is a deep, deep rabbit hole behind koji (Aspergillus oryzae), which is the fungus that, when inoculated on cooked grain, becomes the mother fermentation agent of soy sauce, bean pastes (including misos), sake, and shochu. Koji can be deployed in a variety of ways to enhance the sweetness, richness, or savoriness of a given dish. We use barley inoculated with koji to make a knock-out vinaigrette with calamansi lime (this page). You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.

Bonito flakes: Made from dried skipjack tuna, bonito flakes are commonly used as a garnish on hot food. The heat rising from the dish causes the flakes to dance. You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.

Calamansi vinegar: Calamansi is a wonderfully fragrant citrus common to Southeast Asia that has mandarin orange and kumquat qualities and resembles a lime. We use Huilerie Beaujolaise brand vinaigra de calamansi.

Calcium chloride: An additive commercially known as Pickle Crisp, these granules help keep pickled products crisp in their pickling medium. We use it in our Bread and Butter Pickles (this page), which are sliced before pickling and can turn mushy more quickly than whole vegetables. It can be found online or at most grocery stores.

Cinchona bark: Cinchona bark is harvested from the cinchona tree, an evergreen plant native to the Andes of South America. The bark contains a naturally occurring form of quinine and has long been used in the treatment and prevention of malaria. Quinine on its own is extremely bitter, and to make it more palatable, British colonials in India began mixing quinine water with citrus, sugar, and gin. Thus, the gin and tonic was born. Cinchona bark can be bought at natural foods or herbal supplement stores or websites, or from online craft cocktail suppliers.

Citric acid: This powder derived from citrus has a number of culinary uses, most notably in canning and preserving, where it is added to lower the pH of ingredients and make them shelf stable. It is useful in discouraging oxidization of baked goods and is helpful in seasoning when acidity is needed but moisture is not. We rely on the powder to give an acidic kick to our nori potato chips (this page). It can be purchased online or in the baking aisle of many supermarkets.

Golden Mountain sauce: This stir-fry sauce, used extensively in Thai cooking, is a saltier, sweeter cousin to soy sauce. It adds savory depth to just about anything, like our Lobster Stew (this page). You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.

Hijiki. See Seaweeds

Katsuobushi flakes: Another core ingredient in the Japanese pantry, katsuobushi flakes are made from smoked and dried bonito. They impart a deep, smoky essence to Dashi (this page), which is a really important part of our repertoire at Eventide. You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.

Kombu. See Seaweeds

Masa harina: This corn flour goes through the ancient nixtamalization process to make it edible and digestible before being made into tortillas, tamales, pupusas, and other products. We fry it into crispy bits to garnish the black bass ceviche dish (this page) at Eventide. You can but it online or at most grocery stores.

Micro sorrel and micro mustard greens: Specially grown because they are beautiful and pack a surprising amount of flavor, microgreens make great additions to a salad and they can be used as a dynamic garnish. You can find them at farmers’ markets or specialty food stores, but they’re often pricey. They’re also extraordinarily easy to grow at home (check info and instructions at online seed sellers, such as johnnyseeds.com), and we grow our own at the restaurants. Micro sorrel has an amazing tartness that works nicely in our Lightly Cured Char (this page) and micro mustard greens are peppery and pair well with full-flavored fish, like in our Cured Salmon (this page).

Mustard oil: Made by pressing mustard seeds into oil, this spicy, peppery ingredient adds a nice punch to dressings, as for our Coleslaw (this page) and the Pickled Ramp Relish in our Chu-Toro (this page). You can buy it online or at Asian grocery stores. We like the Rhee Bros brand.

Palm sugar: A sweetener derived from the sap of palm trees, palm sugar is used a lot in Southeast Asian cooking. It has a caramel or maple-like flavor (light brown sugar is a good substitute in equal quantity) and brings balance to sauces like our Nam Phrik (this page). You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.

Pink salt: A curing salt for meats that staves off bad bacteria growth. It is also known as Insta Cure #1 or Prague powder. We use it for Salt Pork (this page), a staple of New England cooking. You can buy it online at www.butcher-packer.com.

Salt: We use kosher salt and finishing salt throughout this book and our favorite brands are Diamond Crystal kosher salt and Maldon finishing salt.

Salted black beans: Another secret weapon brought to us by koji (see Barley koji, this page), these fermented, dried soybeans are like little umami jewels that lend deep savoriness to our Hoisin Sauce (this page). You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores, where it’s usually sold in sealed bags or jars.

Seaweeds (kombu, hijiki, wakame): Abundant, sustainable, nutritious, and versatile, seaweeds of all kinds can be found on the Eventide menu. Kombu, a large, flat type of seaweed that is sold fresh and dried, shows up in our Dashi (this page). Hijiki, a black sea vegetable harvested on the coasts of Japan, Korea, and China and sold dried, goes into our Pickled Sea Vegetables (this page) with dried wakame, another commonly used type of seaweed. Wherever you use it, seaweed brings its briny, ocean-y essence. You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.

Shaoxing rice wine: The most common spirit in Chinese cooking, this amber-hued liquid adds an aromatic, nutty element to sauces (like our Korean BBQ Sauce on this page), marinades, fillings, and other products.

Shiro miso: Also known as white miso, shiro miso is a mild, salty-sweet seasoning paste popular in Japanese cooking. We use it for the spicy miso glaze (this page) and sesame sauce (this page) recipes in the book. You can buy it online in sealed containers or find it refrigerated in Asian grocery stores.

Tapioca starch: A flourlike ingredient derived from cassava, it is used widely in gluten-free baking. We like using it for our puffed snacks because it is almost completely flavorless.

Tellicherry peppercorns: The Cadillac of black peppercorns has a deeper, more pungent flavor than your average little peppercorn, making it a great addition to our Black Pepper and Lemon Ice (this page). You can buy it online or in most grocery stores.

Ticaloid 210 S Powder: A perfect mix of natural gums designed to stabilize and thicken foods. For years our orgeat required regular shaking to prevent separation and it wasn’t until we read Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence that we learned about the dark magic that is Ticaloid 210 S Powder.

Umeboshi: The word usually refers to ultra-sour, salty pickled plums popular in Japan, but umeboshi also refers to a style of salting and preserving that can be applied to a lot of different ingredients. Check out the Tuna Tartare recipe on this page to see how we use umeboshi to make a punchy vinaigrette for dressing the dish. You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.

Wakame. See Seaweeds

Xanthan gum: A powder that is used for thickening sauces and keeping them from separating, like in our Mussels en Escabeche (this page). You can buy it online or in most grocery stores. There are not great substitutes, frankly, but you can leave it out of a recipe.

Yuzu kosho: This fermented Japanese condiment is made with red or green chiles, salt, and the juice and zest of the yuzu fruit, which is tart like grapefruit and fragrant like mandarin orange. It is one of the greatest hot sauces on earth, and a very small bit goes a long way. We use both the red and green versions. The former is grassier and the latter has more of a chile-forward flavor, but both are delicious. Check out the Yuzu Kosho Ice (this page) and the Cure Salmon (this page) to see how we incorporate this powerful little number into Eventide dishes. You can buy it online or in Asian grocery stores.