Lateral Cooking | Niki Segnit
Lateral Cooking
One Dish Leads To Another
By Niki Segnit
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.
Niki Segnit: My name is Niki Segnit and my new book is called Lateral Cooking: One Dish Leads to Another.
Suzy Chase: And here's the followup to your hugely successful 2010 book, The Flavor Thesaurus. This is a cookbook full of open-ended recipes, a dense... and that's a bit of an understatement... 610 page cookbook. Lateral Cooking is organized into 77 starting point recipes divided into 12 chapters, reducing the variety of world cuisine down to its bare essentials. I can't stress how unique this cookbook is. Can you talk a little bit about how one dish leads to another?
Niki Segnit: The book was originally conceived as a book about how to flavor lots and lots of different kitchen classics, so that was a very common sense follow-up to The Flavor Thesaurus. It would just be here's how to flavor ice cream or risotto or gnocchi in countless ways. It would be a kind of interesting directory for anybody who just wanted to maybe be a bit more ingredient led in their cooking. But in the years that I was researching it and going through, I mean thousands and thousands of recipes, I started to take notice of all the, if you like the patterns of how different recipes that we, you know, things that we might have thought of being very different to each other actually were very similar.
And what happened was I suppose I ended up deconstructing loads and loads of dishes from all over the world. I mean just, I guess there are thousands in the book and putting them into family groups. It's like a family tree of recipes. And what you get when you tuck into the reading of it, is that you'll see how lots and lots and lots of things are connected. And not only is that quite interesting if you like reading about food, but if you like cooking and you've always thought that maybe something was out of your confidence zone, when you see if it's quite close to something that you've made dozens of times before you can start to feel like, "Oh yes I can do that. It's close to something that I can make. So why wouldn't I give it a go?"
My overriding mission, as I got later into writing the book, was to also create a book that people could read if they wanted to learn to cook without using recipes. And so the whole book is written with that in mind, with that aim of people who want to become intuitive, who can just tug down a bowl from the shelf and get going on something because they know what to do.
Suzy Chase: In the early stages of Lateral Cooking, you drew up a list of the best things you had ever eaten. What were some of the items that were on that list?
Niki Segnit: So yeah, I mean so many of the things that are on that list are a broth and stock base, so they were butternut squash risotto, which I ate in a restaurant in London. A kind of sausage-y pasta I ate when I was on a business trip to North of Italy. A fantastic coq au vin that I once made, and in fact ended up putting in sandwiches, and that is a meal that my husband maintains is the best thing he's ever eaten. coq au vin sandwiches if you can believe it. Things like a chicken... I think you call it pollo con arroz... just chicken with rice which I ate in a beach in the South of Spain, that was just made with the darkest chicken stock I have ever, ever seen. That wonderful red braised Chinese pork. It just kind of came to me that so many of the really, really wonderful, deep, memorable things that I've eaten in my life are to do with starting with a good stockpot.
Suzy Chase: You have some obscure or counter-intuitive suggestions. Talk about one example with ice cream.
Niki Segnit: Yeah, I mean it's really funny. I think when you think of writing a book like this and you're thinking about flavoring different classics, ice cream is one of the things that has been really pushed to the limit everywhere. Don't you think? I don't know if there's any flavor that you haven't heard of. I mean I chose mainly 10 different examples of a lot of the classics and the olive oil one I chose to include because I ate it in a Spanish restaurant after having an argument with my husband, which I think I recount in the book because the book has quite a few stories and it's quite a chatty book. I mean but all you have to do to make an olive oil ice cream is to make a typical ice cream base and then whisk some good olive oil in it.
I think there's a description of it in the book that says something like it was the whole thing because it's so fruity and grassy, it tastes like a frozen picnic. It's absolutely fantastic. But you do have to choose a really good olive oil before you do that. So you just taste it on a spoon and if you think oil before you think olive then you had to choose another olive oil.
Suzy Chase: So yeah, oftentimes I find cookbooks to be so serious. And I love that you brought humor into this process and your stories.
Niki Segnit: It's the only way I know to be really. I have a slightly privileged position as a writer of cookbooks and this was the case for The Flavor Thesaurus as well, which is I'm just an amateur cook. In fact I'm a very keen amateur cook and I've cooked a lot of things and I've tested all the recipes but I'm not a chef. I'm not somebody who can preach on high or feels the need to take a very serious authoritative position. I do think, as you know, I'm talking to somebody who's in my kitchen who likes cooking like I do, who considers it a really good fun thing to do. There's never anything in my book that's trying to cajole people into making things or persuade them that, "oh come on, you can do this."
I know that the people that I'm writing for, this is quite... this is a book for keenies . This is a book for cooking geeks and people who just, who think about cooking all day. So I can talk to them about irritating incidents with cooking equipment or like where to get certain ingredients and stuff with a chatty flourish, I think.
Suzy Chase: Using bread as an example, talk a bit about committing a formula to memory as opposed to trying to remember 10 recipes.
Niki Segnit: This goes for quite a few of the chapters in the book, but bread is one of the smoothest as far as this is concerned because when I put in all the recipes together in continuum so they're linked up, what I've tried to do is not only keep the quantities the same wherever possible, but also to keep the language that's used to write the methods the same so that things become super familiar rather than it feeling like doing something different every time. So with the bread continuum, the first starting point on that line is unleavened flatbread which is just as simple as adding enough water to flour and a bit of salt in order to make a dough. And that's a very basic thing, but the flavors and variations in that section take you into so many interesting different places.
So actually it's the same thing to do if you want to make matzo crackers or if you want to make Scottish oatcakes. If you mix up that and grate a coconut you can make a Sri Lankan flat bread called pol roti. Or if you put some chickpea flour and actually some chopped up spinach and nigella seeds then you can make missi roti, which is a popular bread in Rajasthan. You can even make buckwheat Japanese noodles with the same dough. Okay, but we start with two cups of flour and about two thirds of a cup of water. And from there you can make so many different things and that's before you even kind of open the cupboard up and start looking at all the different flours that you've collected over the year because you've been buying all these kind of wonderful and interesting different flours from around the world.
And then as you progress along the bread continuum, the next thing we go to is biscuits and Irish soda bread and cobbler. And they're all made with the same formula. But again, I use the same two cups of flour and about two thirds of a cup of water so that it stays consistent. And in fact it stays consistent all the way through breads. So the next thing we have is leavened bread, so using yeast instead of using a chemical leavener. And then you have buns where you use milk instead of water and maybe a little bit of egg so you are enriching the dough. But in fact when you look at the proportions of those things, you're still using the same amount of liquid to flour. It's just that you're using it in beaten egg rather than water and milk in some places. And then the same with brioche.
And then finally that continuum ends up with babas and savarins. And that is where you take that too and you use some milk on top of water and you end up with a batter instead of a dough. But when you see all the different formulas written next to each other, so similar that all you have to do is just learn the little tweak that makes one thing another. So it's my contention that anybody can learn to make pretty much every bread from around the world in a week or less.
Suzy Chase: God, that's so clever.
Niki Segnit: It's always so interesting. I just thought it has revolutionized my cooking because when it comes to standards like that, when it comes to things that are like custards or breads or cakes and cookies, just being able to say, "Oh I want to make that so I'm going to get started," and don't have to consult anything. I cook like somebody who knows how to cook. Whereas previously I really was a recipe robot. Even as I was writing The Flavor Thesaurus I was someone who learned to cook by following recipes and cook like someone who learned to cook following recipes, because I didn't have any flexibility in me. I didn't have any confidence in my intuition and it hadn't occurred to me that actually you can learn to have intuition.
It sounds, I know of course it sounds ironic, but that's exactly what you'd do if you were a musician, you learn how to play the notes and then you can improvise, and that's what got me so excited about writing Lateral Cooking. It took eight years, which is a phenomenal amount of time to work on one project very deeply every day, but it was never boring because it's just such a fascinating thing to find all these amazing little connections between all these things that you want to eat or you want to try.
Suzy Chase: I don't know anyone who doesn't love a homey chicken or vegetable stock, so I would love to drill down on your brown chicken stock recipe that's on page 208. I made it over the weekend and I have so many questions. First off, what's the difference between stock broth and consomme?
Niki Segnit: I don't know if there's a really definitive difference between a stock and a broth, but I think there's a very useful one that comes up quite often, and it helped me decide how I was going to position them in the book. And that is with stock you throw the ingredients that you're using to flavor the water away and with broth you eat them. So that one's clear. With consomme of course you're doing that incredibly magical thing where you take the stock or broth, it's probably more likely to be a broth but it could be a stock, and then you clarify it and make sure it's flavorful enough in order to serve it as a soup on its own. I mean sometimes with consommes they're layered with... you'll make a stock and then you'll actually add some more flavors to it and then you might add something else because you're aiming for something that is, if you like, perfect in itself, you're not going to be serving it with anything else. Just that zinging clear soup.
Suzy Chase: So next to the ingredients are tiny letters that correspond to leeways. Tell us about leeways.
Niki Segnit: This came up as I was coming up with all these different flavor variations of recipes because I was collecting dozens of recipes for each of the starting points. I also started to note down, well what happens if I want to make this cake and I don't have that many eggs or I've only got baking soda and not baking powder, well those kinds of things came up. And so what I've done for each of the 77 start points is put little notes by all the ingredients, or some of the methods as well, just saying look if you don't have this, you can do this. This is how to make a buttermilk if you don't have any buttermilk. This is a standard amount of sugar but it would be absolutely fine to cut it down to a certain level or whatever you want.
So it's full of practical tweaks as well, if you like. I mean, I'm sure if you're a professional chef you never run out of anything. But of course for most of us home cooks, we don't necessarily have a perfectly stocked larder. So it's useful to know how to change things up if you're short of something or if you have certain dietary requirements. I try and talk about where the gluten is important and where it doesn't matter, that kind of thing.
Suzy Chase: This stock recipe starts off with browning the chicken pieces. Why brown?
Niki Segnit: Because it's a brown chicken stock we're going to brown them, so we're going to create more flavor. It's just as simple as that. So lots of people in some dishes, like our risotto, sometimes will call for a White chicken stock where you just don't bother with the browning at all. But this is just about adding depth of flavor.
Suzy Chase: And this calls for one onion but we shouldn't peel it. Why leave the peel on?
Niki Segnit: Again it's flavor and color. I mean, I think one of the great things about making a stock, and getting used to making stock, is that you realize that this is not like making a casserole or a start dish. It's about just kind of getting it in and getting it going, so. And the onion, if you ever made just an onion stock or vegetable stock, you know the onion peel adds a nice kind of brownie, appealing, flavorful looking color.
Suzy Chase: Then we can add tomato paste, wine or vermouth. What does this bring to the flavor profile?
Niki Segnit: Tomato puree, you're certainly going to to get some sharpness, and some umami in with the wine and vermouth. The Vermouth in particular, very aromatic. So if you're making something kind of Frenchy, chicken maybe, a blanquette if you know that dish, then something like vermouth is going to add some herbal flavors, some like very light floral flavors, a touch of bitterness in those instances. You can leave them out if you don't know what you're actually going to be doing with your chicken stock. If you're just making it maybe for a chicken noodle soup or you don't know kind of quite what you're going to do that yet, you might leave it plain, but I think if you're taking it a certain direction, you might want to add some of those kinds of different taste profiles.
Suzy Chase: So why should we start off with cold water as opposed to hot?
Niki Segnit: Down to the scientific side of things, if you put cold water in and you bring it very slowly up to a simmer and then don't let it boil, just keep it at a very slow simmer whereas just one bubble breaking every now and again, then you get that beautiful clarity that you see sometimes in chicken stock. For most of us when we're making chicken stock, if we're using it for risotto, using it for a soup, chicken noodle soup, or just distilling it down to use it on pastas, it really won't matter because you're not going to see that. It's really only if you've got something in mind where that clarity is going to be particularly beautiful.
Suzy Chase: So talk a little bit about the scum that rises to the surface.
Niki Segnit: So, I mean this is just the impurities coming off the chicken and the bones. So your job is to skim and skim and skim and-
Suzy Chase: Skim again.
Niki Segnit: And skim again. But if you're fussy, I mean again, it's not essential to do that. It's not going to cause any problems with your stock for most of the things that you use it. But if you skim it, if you were to sort of be more along the lines of a Larousse and you skim it, then you can then add a little bit of cold liquid, maybe a bit of cold water to the stock and that will actually create a bit more of the impurities; help them come to the top and then you can skim them off and you skim it off. So if you're making a consomme you're going to go through those kind of very sort of professional French kitchen kind of steps if you want to do that. And if you're making like a few steps along the continuum where you've got veloute, then you might, again, you might do that in order to make the sauce a little bit more refined.
Suzy Chase: It was interesting to see that there's an option to simmer uncovered, which we're all used to doing, but you have another option where you can pop it in the oven at 200 degrees for three to four hours. So does that have the same outcome as simmering?
Niki Segnit: Well, I mean it will have a fairly similar outcome. You get a much more beautiful stock. I mean in terms of the uncloudiness, that is one way if you do want something to look sort of crystally clear, if you put it in the oven. Just because I suppose you manage to achieve that low heat. You will still of course then end up with a big stockpot full of heat and you'll probably need to reduce it because you've managed to keep that heat quite low and you're not going to reduce it as much as you would do necessarily on the hob unless you're using a diffuser, which I don't think most people do. If it's the choice, I would always put it in the oven instead because it just comes out just looking so glorious.
Suzy Chase: I liked it because you can walk away from it. You don't have to hover.
Niki Segnit: It's the same with bread. I feel like this about bread, that I now know because I know so much about how to make bread, you know, how simple it can be. I know when I've got the 10 minutes to throw it together and get that dough going and let it do its thing. Like let it do its rise maybe in the fridge very slowly, so that you don't have to be there for when it's kind of taking it's hour and a half or two hours to get to twice its size. If you put it in the fridge to do that, then you can come back to it in six or seven hours and then continue. I try and keep those things included in the book because it's great. I love cooking but I also have to fit it into a real life.
Suzy Chase: Describe clarifying stock. What does that entail and why would we do it?
Niki Segnit: That's a good question. Why would you do it? [crosstalk 00:18:44]. Are you getting the impression I'm actually quite a slutty stock maker. I very rarely need beautiful clear stock so I'm always, you know, I'm the person who makes the roast chicken on Sunday and then I make my stock the next day just with one carcass, and then have chicken noodle soup the next day. It doesn't need to be really beautiful. But if you want to clarify your stock or you want to scare your children because it looks so kind of repulsive actually, you can whisk up some egg whites and then stir them into the stock. And what happens is they congeal, and they rise to the surface bringing with them all the little bits and bobs that have been floating around the stock. So they make a raft that floats on the top and then you should be able to lift it off and then underneath you have a beautiful clear stock.
There's a lot of ways of trying to make your stock clear when I'm saying you don't really need it, you probably don't need to do it. But there is a downside as well with doing that. So you can, unfortunately, you can take a bit of flavor off the stock if you do that clarification thing. You lift off some certain amount of flavor with the egg. So if you're a fussy French chef what you might do is you might mix that egg white with some of whatever the flavor of your stock is. So you might use some minced chicken with the egg white and then so that's actually going to cook into the stock and replace some of the flavor that's going to disappear, and just enrich it a bit further which is always... a really rich stock is a wonderful thing.
Suzy Chase: What's great about this cookbook is you've thought about all of these steps to put into making stock that I have never thought about.
Niki Segnit: It's options, it's options along the way. I mean the thing is is that you'll see that the method for all the starting points is written bigger. And then underneath there's a little aside. Sometimes it will say you're doing this because of this, or the reason that you're doing this, or you don't have to do this. So you kind of, as you use the book a bit more often, which you don't need to necessarily read the little notes because they're just telling you, they're kind of an aside.
Suzy Chase: Well if you love to read cookbooks, you're going to want this cookbook because it's a really great read too.
Niki Segnit: Well I mean, thank you. The thing is, is I say I'm not a professional chef. I'm somebody who loves to cook, but I write these books because I like to write. When I decided that I wanted to write The Flavor Thesaurus and give it a go, it was because I love MFK Fisher, and I love Elizabeth David, and I like Nigella Lawson's How To Eat. I like those books that you can sit down and read and that kind of give you a bit of an opening onto the context of the food. Where did you eat it? Where did you try it? A little story around it.
Sometimes I might do something that you don't normally do in cookbooks, which is to say I'm not crazy about this. I don't particularly like it. So it's very subjective. It's very chatty. Yes, I don't hold back on when I think something is funny. I work hard to describe things. So certainly that was the thing when I wrote The Flavor Thesaurus is I set myself the task of never saying it's mysterious or it's hard to put your finger on or anything like that. I had to get in the ring and describe what something tastes like. And so the same as with Lateral Cooking, it's not just sketchily thrown off. It's a very written book. There's a lot of consideration gone into what's being said and overall the idea that if people are going to read this much about food and you want to pick up all this interesting stuff, it needs to be entertaining in order for people to sit there with it on their lap and get stuck in. It's got to be rewarding.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. So aside from this cookbook, what is your favorite cookbook and why?
Niki Segnit: Well, I'm a serial monogamist when it to favorite cookbooks. Am I allowed to choose a piece of writing that would definitely be my overall ever, ever favorite, and that is from MFK Fisher. I think it's from The Art of Eating and it's called, I Was Really Very Hungry. It was what was in my head when I was writing The Flavor Thesaurus, is something that would be a beacon to what I would like to achieve. And it's a piece about her going to a restaurant in France where she's on her own. She's in Burgundy, it sounds like she's been out for a long walk, and then she goes to this rather fancy restaurant at lunchtime and she's the only person in there and she's having a meal. But she's constantly being talked to by the waitress who is just a food fanatic. And there's this chef in the kitchen who I think is called Paul, and she just keeps kind of, the waitress keeps coming in and saying, "Oh, he's got this, and he made this."
And it's just the most wonderful piece because it's very, very appetizing. The food sounds fantastic, but it's also a really great character study. What was great about it was that she takes us into this passion she has to food, and this scenario where she's really enjoying this incredible meal. So she really sets the table for you. You're there. That is, I would say, by far my favorite piece of food writing as far as food books, cookbooks are concerned. Well you know, it's terrible isn't it? But I just end up with such a flirtation for a while with one and then another.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Niki Segnit: Okay, so I believe I have a website called nikisegnit.com. My name is N-I-K-I S-E-G-N-I-T. But the place that I use the most is Instagram. So I sometimes Instagram things that I've been making, things I've been doing. And that is just Nikki Segnit.
Suzy Chase: Thanks so much, Niki, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Niki Segnit: Thank you so much for having me.
Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.
