ROASTED PUMPKIN CAPONATA

notes on vegetable cookery, a little agrodolce theory + we might have found the new Bob Dylan.

Hello and welcome back!

It’s a slightly belated issue this week after a stretch of the flu (tis’ the season). So lucky you lot, it’s a double barreled How I Cook week! As well as this issue, there’ll be one out on Friday morning too, a “two-tone” spatchcocked chicken inspired by a lovely restaurant in Mexico City. It’s smoky, spicy, juicy, covered in salsa, etc. so lots to look forward to this week!

For now, we’re taking on the mighty caponata, a new frontier for HIC. I suppose if you still have a pumpkin knocking around after the halloween weekend, then go ahead and caponata that, but I really do think this is a recipe worth scooping up a fresh delica or crown prince pumpkin for. There will be reference to a couple of techniques we’ve talked about before (pan-roasting, balancing sweet and sour, toasting nuts etc), so some of you How I Cook lifers will be ready to smash this one out the park, but for those who’re new around here I’m going to cover them off in some detail below. I like to make a big batch of this and have it sitting in the fridge, as with so many recipes that are erring on the side of condiment, this one improves dramatically with age.

As well as a lovely recipe, we’ve got music from South East London’s answer to Dylan, an excellent new pasta cookbook from Tim Siadatan.

Happy cooking!

Cheers,

B x

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CAPONATA: A DISH OR A TECHNIQUE?

Caponata is, and should be, a punchy thing to eat. A good one is at once rich, salty, sweet, sour, crunchy, and deceptively luxurious. We’ve spoken a lot on this newsletter about balancing a recipe being the secret to a perfectly delicious plate of food. It’s quite ying-yang, right? When you eat pickled plums with fatty pork belly or whipped cream with poached fruit to balance the tart, sweet, rich and savoury. These are elements playing off of one another to make a whole, balanced plate. Fine tuning these elements is like twirling the low/mid/high nobs on your single mate’s personality defining “do you want to know how much this cost?” record player. A hi-fidelity, crisp, listening-party-level plate has bags of flavour, but crucially is communicated in perfect, heady balance.

Caponata should taste complete by itself, ready to be simply spooned into an awaiting gob, or served with extremely simple carbs or proteins. You’ll catch people smearing caponata onto a piece of grilled bread or lashing piles of the stuff onto ball of mozzarella. Grilled or roasted chicken and fish are brought to life with a small pile of this piquant condiment-cum-stew on the side.

Maybe the most famous dish to hail from Sicily, caponata is a product of the island’s revolving door of back to back occupations. Everyone from the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, to the Arabs and Spaniards have planted their flag on the island, each leaving fingerprints on Sicily’s cuisine. Rich, luxurious pine nuts or almonds, raisins, vinegar and sugar were brought to the island and used to celebrate the summer bounty of vegetables, from aubergines to tomatoes to the mighty cardoon. A fantastic example of how historical movement in the mediterranean produced (and will continue to produce) some of the most delicious food in the canon of heaps of cuisines, especially Italian. Tracing the exact origin of the recipe and tracking its evolution is a mammoth task, and one for a different newsletter (tagging in

Jordon Ezra King

)… For us, it’s all about the technique.

It’s important to note here that caponata itself comes in many different forms. My first exposure to this magical recipe was cooked at home by my parents. Enter the familiar tomatoey, aubergine-packed vegetable stew with the texture of ratatouille but the sweet and sour thwack of something completely different. Toasted pine nuts and sweet bursts of raisins ran through the bowl with soft, pillowy clouds of aubergine gently smooshed, under, over and through almost every spoonful. I think we had it with pasta, I can’t really remember. I do however remember how distinctly different it tasted to other tomatoey braises I’d had before, that agrodolce character lodged in my memory and remains to this day one of my favourite profiles in cookery.

Today’s approach to caponata draws on a few different sources of inspiration. I really want to lean into the feeling of this recipe as a condiment, something to complement and enhance other inherently plain ingredients. For this we need to tick a few boxes. First it must be salty. To scratch that itch, we’re using olives and capers. It must also have texture, and I think we can cram in a few. Roasted dense, creamy pumpkin and pine nuts will play with crunchy celery and fennel to add character. It should have a luxurious quality. Olive oil is not just a cooking medium and lubricant in this recipe but a main player on the field of flavour. Alongside all of those vegetables and pantry staples, the olive oil will bring flavour and a rounded, luxe mouthfeel. Finally and most importantly of all, we’ve got to nail the agrodolce, that precarious balance of sweet and sour that makes this recipe so completely, uniquely delicious. I think you can really make caponata with anything, if you tick these boxes and sufficiently nod your head at a few of the hero, evergreen ingredients. The pantry staples are arguably what really set the plate off (nuts, capers, olives, dried fruit, vinegar, sugar) rather than the fresh vegetables. With that in mind, we’re marching on with caponata firmly grasped as a technique, not a set recipe.

CONSIDER DONENESS

In that list of itches that need scratching I mentioned texture. If you’re not careful, caponata can become one big mushy blob and big fat mushy blobs, on the whole, aren’t the most interesting things to eat. There are so many potential textures to be found in the ingredients list for this recipe, so how do we maximise that potential?

Breakdown your ingredients and pick out a specific “doneness” for each. How do you want your celery to eat? How should the pumpkin behave? Should the fennel be soft and sweet or a little al dente? Doneness is something we heavily associate with meat and fish cookery, and not something that often crosses a home cook’s mind when they’re holding a carrot. Think again. You’ll notice in the recipe below that ingredients are thoughtfully chopped and cooked at and via different rates and mediums with the goal of extracting as much textural interest as possible, whilst not compromising on flavour.

COOKING PUMPKIN

The pumpkin delivers are serious level of richness to this caponata. It’s doing the job of the absent summer aubergine in that regard. My go to way to cook chunks of sweet, dense pumpkin is to start them in a pan, caramelising the exterior and then transferring to a medium oven to finish the job. It’s important to cook the pumpkin just enough, it’ll continue to soak up heat in the pan with the caponata, so as soon as you can give it a little squish between your fingers, pull it out of the oven. I always use a bread knife to cut my pumpkins and for this recipe, I do peel them. I want uninterrupted soft, creamy pumpkin, so it’s off with the leathery skin.

AGRODOLCE: A BALANCING ACT

As I’ve said 58 times now, the balance of sweet and sour in this dish is everything. It’d be lovely to be able to use the natural sugars in the fruits and vegetables to play off against just a drip of vinegar, but they just don’t cut the mustard. Despite the raisins, onions, fennel and pumpkin all being inherently sweet, we do need to add a good dose of sugar to achieve the correct sweetness. If you’re unsure, once the raisins are in, taste the mix and adjust as you like. Once you’ve hit your sweetness, it’s time to balance with the vinegar. You’ll notice I use quite a lot more vinegar than I do sugar, I like my caponata a little more on the tart side, but this really is dealer’s choice. For example, Rachel Roddy’s recipe uses a ratio of 1:1 sugar to vinegar, for her version of pumpkin caponata. Rachel uses tomatoes and quite a few other ingredients in her pumpkin caponata, so the demand for the agrodolce is different. Horses for courses.

Beyond all, go steady. You can always add more, but you can’t get it back, if you go too hard with the sugar and vinegar your recipe will taste like ketchup and you’ll only manage a spoon or two before feeling a bit sick.

TOASTING NUTS

If I had a quid for every time I saw someone “toasting’ nuts in a dry frying pan… If you’re toasting nuts in a dry pan, you’re going to only toast that little bit of the nut that is in contact with the pan. The only part of the nut that toasts often toasts a little too far and in most cases, burns. For an even toast, you need to envelop the whole nut with heat. You can do this in an oven set at 150°C, or, you can gently toast the nut in warm oil. I love the oil method as it yields a gorgeous, rich toast on the nut and also, a nut-infused oil! For this recipe, as the oven is already on, we’re going with the oven.

As well as the adding the nuts at the end, I also toss in herbs and seasonal bitter leaves. A little fragrance and an added bitter note is divine and quite winter-coded.

BEN, WHAT SHALL I EAT THIS WITH?

Don't mind the sh*t Hexclad pan.

Chicken! Well, that’s what I had it with and it was class. I roasted this 1.4kg chicken in a 250°C oven with a lemon and some rosemary and sage up its butt, covered in salt and oil for about 30 minutes before dropping the temperature to 160°C and giving it another 10 minutes or so. Rest and carve, foolproof! You can serve your caponata with all sorts really, but I like to make them relatively plain. Anything with big bold flavours will really fight with the caponata, there’ll be too much going on, your brain and your mates’ record player will probably explode. It’s lovely on toast with a soft boiled egg, alongside baked fish or stuck in a toasted sandwich with mozzarella. Delightful.

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ROASTED PUMPKIN CAPONATA

This will make enough caponata to feed 4 with some leftovers and take you about an hour to put together.

INGREDIENTS

1 Small Pumpkin, Delica, Kuri or Crown Prince

75g Pine Nuts

1 Large White Onion

3 Celery Sticks

1 Fennel Bulb

20g Raisins, soaked in boiling water for 10 minutes

50g Pitted Black Olives (I used Kalamata)

25g Capers

1 Tsp Chilli Flakes

25g Caster Sugar

60g Good Quality Red Wine Vinegar

1 Small Radicchio or Red Endive

10g Mint

Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Salt, Black Pepper

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 160°C fan.

Peel and cut the pumpkin into bite-sized chunks. I use a serrated knife to chomp through the tough pumpkin, cutting it in half, peeling and then scooping out the seeds before breaking it down further. Preheat an oven proof frying pan over a medium-high heat. Add a generous layer of olive and add the pumpkin along with a pinch of fine sea salt. Cook for 12-15 minutes, tossing now and then, until the exterior of the pumpkin has begun to caramelise. Slide the whole pan into the oven for 8-10 more minutes until the pumpkin is just cooked and soft all the way through.

Tip the pine nuts onto a tray and toss with salt and a drip of olive oil. Slide into the oven with the pumpkin for 15 minutes or so. You want these really well toasted, so don’t be shy. They’ll darken a little more once you whip them out, so go a shade or two lighter than you think. You can always pop them back in, if you like.

Cut the onion, celery and fennel into a chunky dice. Preheat a large saucepan or dutch oven over a medium heat. Add a layer of olive oil and tip in the chopped veggies. Add a pinch of salt and cook for 20 minutes very gently, stirring regularly, until the veggies are just softening but retain a good level of crunch. Add the raisins, olives, capers and chilli flakes and cook for 2 minutes before adding the sugar, vinegar and turning off the heat. Tip in the pumpkin and gently stir through the mix. Add the pine nuts before finely chopping the bitter leaves and mint and folding through. Allow to sit for 5 minutes before having a taste and adjusting your seasoning. Salt, sugar, vinegar etc. Serve with roasted chicken, grilled bread, or whatever your heart desires.

NB: the leftovers are class. Pop any in a box and tuck them away in the fridge to enjoy the next day. You can microwave or just allow to come up to room temp before devouring.

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Be As It May by Zach Thompson

Really, really into this song from New Cross based folk artist Zach Thompson. The influence is glaring, but in that rare way that doesn’t feel like imitation or aping, rather taking the torch and running towards something very beautiful. Thompson deserves some more listeners, go and give it a spin.

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PADELLA by Tim Siadatan

This is a hell of a cookbook and I don’t know if I ever expected anything else from the Author of Trullo, probably my most reached for cookbook. A compendium of page-turningly delicious pasta recipes, inspiration and technique. Not simply a recipe book, Padella presents a comprehensive diary of all the dishes that have slid across the pass at the eponymous restaurants that thunder along in the big smoke. It’s a seriously good book that I’ll be dog-earing for years to come.

Bravo, Tim!

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Thanks for reading folks!

B x