Cook of the Week Challenge: cooks explain thinking behind recipes
Sofrito. It's a seasoned sauce made from onions, garlic, peppers and tomatoes that's a staple of Cuban cooking, but to Cook of the Week Challenge contestants Antonio De Pau and Judy Monaco it might as well have been from another planet.
Neither cook was familiar with sofrito before it ended up in their bag of challenge ingredients, but they sure learned fast.
Read on to how the Week 4 challengers developed their recipes, then head to dailyherald.com/contest/cook to vote for your favorite sofrito recipe, as well as your favorite recipe in the red wine vinegar and sweet potato challenge.
Old Havana Foods Sofrito, canned tuna, mango and refrigerated biscuit dough
Judy Monaco: My first reaction was, what can I do with packaged or canned tuna and combine it with sofrito, which I had never cooked with before.
After reading the label on the sofrito, it was interesting to see all the ingredients. I did look on the Internet to see how sofrito was used, because it wasn't in any of my cookbooks. Did not find the Internet very helpful. I did talk to some friends about the ingredients. Some just gave me a blank stare, others offered a few ideas, but again none had ever heard of sofrito. So the experimenting began to see what I could do with the tuna and sofrito so they would compliment each other.
It took about four trials of doing different things with the tuna and adding additional ingredient to the sofrito.
With the biscuits I really got stumped for a while, didn't want to just use plain or on top like a crust; that took about six attempts. The easiest ingredient was the mango, which I used in a salad. My husband was my taster and I think he is rather tired of tuna right now.
Antonio De Pau: The day I picked up the ingredient list, I was talking to my cousin in Italy who was intrigued by the contest. I told her what the ingredients were and she reminded me that our grandmother used to make meatballs all the time and sometimes she made them out of tuna! With my cousin's help, we remembered the flavors of those tasty meatballs and I tried to recreate my #8220;nonna'spolpette di tonno.#8221; Instead of using bread crumbs and semolina, I used the refrigerator biscuits and ground them into crumbs.
After I decided I would make the meatballs, I was unsure how to put all the ingredients together. When I started playing around with them I discovered many ways I could utilize all, including putting the meatballs inside the biscuits with a slice of mango, and stuffing the biscuits with mango and feta.
My goal was to make an easy recipe that is not too time consuming and does not require multiple trips to the grocery store. I wanted to create something that was #8220;out of the box#8221; that would have exciting flavors that meshed well together. I tried several variations and used my family as the taste testers, but they got tired of tasting. I had some friends come over for the final critique and together we decided on the final plate.
Holland House Red Wine Vinegar, Polish sausage, sweet potato and plums.
Bob Conidi: My reaction was relief since the ingredients were pretty common, although the combination was quite random. I immediately began tossing around ideas in my head. I thumbed through some cook books, and then went to the Internet. ... I really did not spend a lot of time researching, maybe two to three hours over the weekend.
I thought I had a plan set, but I was looking for a particular recipe when suddenly the thought of pizza came to me, which is not too uncommon to happen at 9 p.m. when I am hungry! I looked at a couple of pizza cookbooks that I have and found a recipe for potato dough, I figured I could substitute sweet potato in the recipe.
Working in the wine vinegar was the toughest of all. I oven-tested a few ideas with the plums but finally settled on the caramelized onions. I have also put fruit on pizza before, so the plum thing was nothing out of the ordinary. I was not satisfied with the sweetness from the plums I had bought so I added some #8220;natural sweetness#8221; with the honey. By 1 a.m. the pizza was in the oven. By 1:30 my stomach was full and I was pleased with the recipe I created.
Penny Kazmier: I love sweet potatoes and had actually secretly hoped they would be in my mystery bag, but when I saw the other ingredients I knew I had my work cut out for me. Smoked sausage is already seasoned and basically fully prepared, so I didn't feel like I could use my usual protein treatments like marinades or rubs which stumped me at first. ... A good friend made a dish last winter called halushki, something I had never tasted before, but pure comfort food with noodles, cabbage and onions as primary ingredients. That was my inspiration. I made her recipe at home a couple weeks later and added a few twists of my own including smoked Polish sausage.
I knew I needed noodles, but felt I couldn't include both noodles and sweet potatoes, so after a couple of experiments I came up with a sweet potato egg noodle that provided a bright orange color and great flavor to compliment the other halushki ingredients. The red wine vinegar provided the much needed acidic component to balance the dish.
I had two options for the plums and first tried to use them in an onion and plum compote #8230; I felt my plate needed something with some bright colors, so I decided on the salad.