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Blitzing - is that the right word?

12 hours ago

"He who analyses blitz is stupid." Rashid Nezhmetdinov


I think the above quote applies to a technical chess thing - the quoter is/was a chess player. However, it could be curiously relevant to this post, although hopefully not in the perjorative sense in a major way. Just on the wrong choice of word.


The appositeness of the quote I think applies to my choice of the word 'blitz' to talk about chopping things up and mixing them together to make something different. Which I now see might not quite have been stupid, but was probably a bit wrong.


But first the word. I chose blitz because it's a word that's often used in recipes and by people talking about and demonstrating recipes and processes. There are other words that they use of course - crush, purée, mash, pound, smash, whiz, chop, whip, sieve - there are probably others, and also the related blend, merge, fuse, mix, combine. So first of all, because of my love of words, I decided to look up definitions, and also origins - well in this case translation, because this is obviously a German word isn't it? And indeed it is, although slightly different of course, from its Old German source. Quick translation? Lightning, flash, flashlight. Speedy, transient and bright, I guess, are what you get from that. Powerful too.


Definitions? Here are five from the Cambridge Dictionary people:



I suppose the commonalities here are attack, destruction and speed. Speed may be relevant, but that's because these days we have machines that do things in a fraction of the time that it took in ages past. As to attack and destruction that is not really what I was aiming for here. I was aiming at something more transformative in the sense of creating something new from a mix of different things, rather than being destructive.


So if we worry about words, then I chose the wrong one. Whiz might have been better because there's something magical about that isn't there? My younger son is constantly referring to his wife as a 'wiz in the kitchen' when she produces yet another wonderful meal.


Enough. I shall now try to explain a process that I think might lead to a series of different posts and the things that are created through this process.


When you put a whole range of foods together, and then mix them together so closely that the original items disappear into the whole - you get something completely new and different. When I was a child I went through a period of mashing all the different items on my plate, and then mixing them all together. Sort of weird, and it didn't last long, morphing into saving the tastiest item on the plate to last. Interesting that I did it though. Was it the taste or the texture that I was after I wonder?


I don't actually remember my mother doing much of the mixing and mashing thing. The only mixed and smoothed things we ate came out of tins - like cream of tomato soup. Of course we had mashed potatoes, but these were mashed with a hand masher and those potatoes were not often mixed with anything else other than a touch of milk and butter perhaps. Very occasionally some grated cheese was mixed in and they were then piped into a muffin kind of tin and baked in the oven. Duchess potatoes? And, of course, they were also used to top our Shepherd's pie, but I really don't remember them being mixed with another vegetable - carrots, swedes ... A mechanical hand whisk was used to whip egg whites into meringue, but there was no mixing involved.


My next experience of this kind of mixing and smoothing, was in France where I encountered the mouli, a tool that I found to be so magical that I bought one and brought it back home. Every evening various vegetables were cooked in water and then ground through the mouli to make the most magical soup. Well it was marginally more complicated than that I guess, but not much. This process created a smooth soup in which the individual tastes of the ingredients merged together, but in which there was still a bit of texture. Today, of course the same thing can be achieved with a stick blender which can achieve the same texture, or a liquidizer which tends to produce a smoother result. Although I guess it depends on how long or how fast you do it.


Then came the liquidizers, the food processors, the nutri bullets, the small blenders not to mention the stand mixer and the electric hand mixers - all of them speedy and pulverizing. Where in early times, one only had a stone to pound things with - which led to the pestle and mortar - or a bunch of twigs to whip things with. Later inventions brought forks, and whisks, and sieves, but it really wasn't until the modern age and electricity that we had the vast array of implements that can help us chop, and grate, pulverize and squash, mix and blend, so that today we can use them in ever inventive ways to make new things - or to make old things in a new way.


So herewith a few examples beginning with smoothies. I was introduced to these on a trip to Canada to visit our son and then partner, now wife, when they were living there before children. They began their day at that time with a smoothie, and showed me how. Like the French soup experience it was life-changing for a while. So much so, I - the non breakfast person you remember - had a smoothie for breakfast every day. I was able to mix together various fruits and dairy products - even those - like milk - that I really didn't like - in a liquidizer and enjoy a delicious healthy drink. I gave it up after a while. I don't know why, and maybe I should try it again. It's such a transformative thing, where the individual ingredients become an entirely new thing - and always different.


Dips. I suspect I encountered these first in Greek restaurants where it was the usual entrée. Nowadays there is at least half an aisle of dips to buy in the supermarket. Too much choice? Ther hare also thousands and thousands of recipes from which to choose, or just wing it with a tin of beans, some spices, oil and an acid. Maybe some yoghurt or tahini. The possibilities are almost infinite.


Ditto for pesto which I suppose is a kind of a dip, except that it's not used in the same way as a dip. This became big back in the 80s perhaps - I'm not looking these things up today - and back then was simply the traditional pesto of basil, parmesan, garlic, olive oil and pine nuts. Nowadays there are pestos made from every suitable herb and vegetable, and you don't just toss them through pasta either. You marinade things in them, you top things with them, you mix them into breads ...


A base for something else - this example is from Ottolenghi, who to my mind made this a trend, although I may be doing somebody else a disservice here. What you do here is make some kind of purée and then put something else on top - the something else ranging from tomatoes, to stews. This version here could be said to be a dip on a dip - muhummara on butter bean mash. The topping is never smooth like the base. You need the contrast I suppose. And that base is increasingly being used in tarts of every kind on which to perch your star ingredient(s). Cheese is often involved for these.


Pâté. An old and venerable tradition from long ago, which often was based on offal, flavoured with liquids and spices and pounded to a very smooth paste with a lot of effort and over some time. Terrines and meatloaves are similar I guess, but not as smooth. Not as blitzed. More textural, but equally diverse in their ingredients.


Páté, it seems to me, is slightly out of fashion at the moment. You don't see much these days - unless you are in France. If you do it's likely to be vegetarian or fishy rather than made with livers.


Sauce. Sauce covers a range of different things, from a kind of gravy made with what is left in the tin after roasting, with the addition of other things such as wine and herbs - to bottled sauce of every conceivable kind. The one shown here is a teryaki sauce. Every country has at least one sauce, that is in everyday use, and every one is made from such a variety of ingredients, that the finished result is a completely new thing. Some of them are traditional, some of them are new. Every day almost, it seems that some chef or other discovers some new sauce.


Then there are the sauces that are concocted through the process of sautéeing and braising, made from a mixture of what was originally in the pan and what you have added to achieve the final master touch.


Oils. Choose an oil, choose a herb or a spice, or a mixture of one or both, warm through and bottle. Well that's one process. Another is to blitz a herb or spice and an oil together. Such things do that supremely modern thing - they are drizzled over something for the final touch.



Last thing - to hide things or to try something different with an ingredient. Children of course are the primary audience from whom you have to hide things. Like extra vegetables - as Jamie does here in his 7 veg tomato sauce. The tomatoes remain as the dominant flavour but hidden in there are several other kinds of vegetables - greens for example - that you would like your children to eat. Although it's not always children you want to hide things from. Anchovies, for example are something that many people do not like, but just a few slipped into that same tomato sauce can make quite a big but undefinable difference to the sauce. The trick is to not use too much so that it will be noticeable.


The other associated process is blitzing something as an ingredient that is normally never blitzed. I recently saw Jamie blitz some broccoli for example, before cooking it, although I cannot now remember what it was that he was making. I do remember being quite taken by the idea however. So I am sure there are lots of other examples.


So what did I really mean by blitzing and is it worth pursuing each type of thing listed above separately? I suspect not. I think I was trying to separate smooth blitzed things from chunky mixed things but often how smooth or how chunky the finished thing is is purely a matter of taste. Soup for example, in our house is sometimes a minor clash between chunky - David - and smooth - me. The taste is different though isn't it? If it's chunky you taste the individual components. In smooth you have something subtler and more mysterious. You can't always tell what the initial ingredients were.


Blitz was probably the wrong word though. Maybe it should have been something completely different like 'smooth'.


YEARS GONE BY

March 3

2020 - deleted

2018 - Nothing

 
 

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