Making Roti from Scratch, Grenadian Style

Susan's Roti - beautiful, no?

On Sunday we went to the home of a Grenadian friend to learn how to make roti from scratch. With four sets of hands, it took a bit more than three and a half hours. We had a wonderful time, and the results of our first efforts, thanks to Dingis' excellent tutelage and oversight, were pretty darn good. Dingis was particularly impressed with JP's crushing of the split peas for the dal puri, one of the steps you can see in the slideshow below. 

This recipe makes 25 roti and will take 2 people 3-4 hours (not counting the overnight marinating) – don’t try this alone!  Do note the overnight marinating/seasoning; prepare that the night before your roti party.

Recipe: Chicken Roti "Dingis"
First prepared: Lower Woburn, St. George's, Grenada, West Indies

Sequence (details follow):

1. spice up chicken and marinate overnight
2. start peas boiling
3. start chicken cooking
4. peel and dice potatoes
5. start dough
6. season peas
7. add potatoes to curry
8. first kneading
9. mash or grind peas
10. second kneading
11. continue to mash or grind peas
12. form balls with dough
13. insert peas in balls
14. prepare griddle
15. roll and cook roti
16. serve with curry

Chicken Curry

4 pounds chicken legs and thighs, cut in two, washed in lime juice, “cleaned” and put in large bowl or plastic container; add the following:

1 teaspoon. cooking salt (Adobo brand or similar) and/or Baron’s complete seasoning

1 tablespoon curry powder, preferably West Indian

1 teaspoon “Grenada saffron” (ground turmeric)

1 teaspoon ground cloves

5 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced

2 large onions, coarsely chopped

1 tablespoon vinegar or lime juice

Black pepper

3 seasoning peppers chopped

3 tablespoons bottled Green Seasoning

2 stalks celery including leaves chopped

1 tablespoon garam masala (we did not have masala on June 10)

Mix, cover and let stand in fridge overnight.

1 teaspoon oil
1 teaspoon ground tumeric (known as saffron in Grenada)
Seasoned chicken (above)
2-3 pounds white potatoes, peeled and diced
2 cups water

To a large, hot, dry pot over medium heat add the oil and tumeric. Add chicken mixture, cover and “let steam” (so chicken can “take ingredients in”) about 15 minutes. Taste and add salt if necessary (Dingis added at least 1 T. on June 10)

Add the potatoes and the water; cover and cook until liquid is reduced and chicken is cooked, another 25 to 30 minutes.

Dal Puri

one half pound yellow split peas
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons oil
5 or 6 cloves (about half a head) of garlic, grated or pressed
1 medium onion, grated
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cloves
black pepper
"Serious Double Pinch" of Adobo or  Baron's Season Salt

Cover the split peas with water (at least 2” above level of peas) and add the salt.

Bring to boil and cook about 15 minutes until peas are cooked but still firm, then drain.

To a medium, hot, dry pot add 4 T. oil and the onion and garlic and cook over medium heat until light brown.  Add the coooked split peas, garlic, onion, curry, cloves, black pepper, and Adobo seasoning.  Cook together briefly (about 3 minutes) and remove from heat and let cool.

When cool, grind in meat grinder or mash with rolling pin on board (we did the latter on June 10) until all peas are mashed or picked out – now it’s ready to be inserted in the dough

Roti (dough)

2 pounds “counter” flour (described to us as a “heavier” flour than baking flour)

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons baking powder

240 grams shortening or margarine

~ 1 cup water and knead vigorously until mixed
2 tablespoons oil

Mix the dry ingredients well;  blend the shortening or margarine and the water with your fingers until it resembles course meal.  Add 2 T. oil and knead vigorously until smooth. Cover and let rest about 30 minutes, then knead vigorously 10-15 times.

Cover and let rest again about 20 minutes.

Form into 25 smooth balls about halfway between golf and tennis size. One ball at a time, pull ball into smooth disk a bit larger than your palm. Put a heaping tablespoon of pea mixture into center of disk; draw/pinch edges of disk together tightly over peas to form a larger, slightly flattened ball with the peas inside and the pinched-together side on the bottom.

Prepare a hot griddle over low heat. Roll out a dough ball very thinly on a floured board to about 8” diameter. Oil the griddle with the bottom of a metal cup or a pastry brush. 

Place the rolled out dough on the griddle and oil the top with the bottom of a metal cup or pastry brush. Cook until it puffs a little and light brown spots appear on the bottom

Flip and cook until light brown spots appear on the bottom. Remove roti and wipe griddle with paper towel and re-oil. Roll out next dough ball and repeat process

Stack cooked roti on top of a paper towel sprinkled with water and place a double layer of paper towels sprinkled with water on top of the stack to keep soft – re-sprinkle as necessary.

Serve as soon as possible, under, beside, or wrapped around curry mixture.

Here's the slideshow of our adventure.

Geera Pork, as promised

I promised the recipe for Geera Pork a week ago - oh, well.  Our time on the boat is growing short - we will be on our way to Trinidad in a week or so - and I will have to continue building the repertoire and posting to the blog while we are landside.

This recipe is straight from Ann VanderHoof's second book, Spice Necklace.  She got it from "Miss Pat", who had a restaurant of sorts in the back of a bar in Port of Spain; I have gathered from Ann's more recent posts that she no longer cooks for the general public.  This recipe is deceptively simple, and totally delicious and addictive.  You will not be able to believe that something that cooks so long, and is essentially "dry" at the end, can taste so marvelous.  I made white rice, and pulled the Pumpkin Lentil Stew from the freezer and every bite of that pork was gone (and yes, it was just the three of us).

Recipe: Geera Pork
First prepared: aboard Raconteur in early 2012

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons demerara or brown sugar
1 and a half pounds boneless pork (I use tenderloin), cut into cubes
1 teaspoon Kosher or sea salt
4 teaspoons ground roasted cumin, aka geera
2 cups hot water
Hot pepper sauce, to taste


Heat the oil in a large pot.  Add the sugar.  Cook, stirring frequently (more like constantly), until it is bubbling and dark brown and you can smell the caramel, about 3 to 4 minutes.  


Carefully add the meat, sprinkle with salt and geera, and stir until the meat is coated in the caramelized sugar.  Cook, uncovered, until the meat has released its juices and is very brown, stirring frequently - about 15-20 minutes.


Add the two cups of hot water, pouring it into the side of the pot, NOT on top of the pork.  Once the water is sizzling, stir and continue cooking for about 1 hour, until the pork is tender and the sauce has cooked down.  The finished dish should be fairly dry, not a stew. The sauce should be very dark brown and coat the meat.


Stir in hot pepper sauce and additional geera and salt to taste; there should be sufficient geera to give the dish a slight grittiness.  Continue to cook for a few minutes to blend the flavors.


Serves 4, just.

Here's the final dish.

Pumpkin Lentil Stew

Tomorrow I will publish one of our very favorite Caribbean recipes, for Geera Pork, which I will be making for dinner tonight.  Along side it, we will have the last of the frozen Pumpkin Lentil Stew that I made a few weeks ago, and white rice.  West Indian pumpkin does not look much like the Halloween pumpkin of North America - I found this photo, and hope I'm not sued for using it instead of one of my own - and it is nearly always available in the fresh markets on all of our favorite islands.  I also make a mean Pumpkin Ginger Curry soup; that one has also made it to the repertoire, so I'll get around to posting it eventually.  This stew makes a really great vegetarian main course, too - filling and delicious.  It comes from the English cook and writer Nigel Slater - you can find more of his stuff here - and he thinks of it as a fall/winter dish, but we found it just right in the Tropics, too.

Recipe: Pumpkin Lentil Stew
First prepared: aboard Raconteur in early 2012

1 medium onion, halved from the root and thickly sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil, or butter, or a combination
1 large carrot, scrubbed and diced
2 cloves of garlic, sliced thinly
a bushy sprig of rosemary, leaves roughly chopped
250 grams (on the high side of 1 cup) small green lentils (like Le Puy)
1.25 litres (5.25 cups) vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
1.5 kilograms (2.8 pounds, before peeling) pumpkin or butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into large chunks
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
a handful of roughly chopped parsley
6 tablespoons crème fraîche
~1 additional tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Warm the oil or butter in a large casserole and add the onion; cook over low to moderate heat until soft and pale gold, about 15 minutes or so. Stir in the diced carrot; after about 5 minutes, add garlic and rosemary.  When all is soft, sweet and lightly colored, add the lentils and 1 litre (4+ cups) of the stock, reserving ~1 cup of stock.  Add the bay leaves, and bring the mixture to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer the lentils for about 45 minutes.


Add the pumpkin chunks to the lentils and leave to simmer until the squash is thoroughly tender - about 15 minutes.  Add salt, pepper and the red wine vinegar, and stir in the parsley.  


Remove two large ladles of the stew; add the remaining 250ml (1 cup) of stock and purée in a blender, food processor or (my new best friend) immersion blender.  Return the puréed mixture to the pan and stir gently.

To serve, pile into wide bowls or deep plates.  Drop a heaped tablespoon of  crème fraîche onto each portion, and drizzle with a little EVOO.  

Serves 4-6, and keeps a couple of days in the fridge or weeks in the freezer and reheats beautifully. 

 

Cooking class and Callaloo Soup

When we were in Dominica for a few days last week, the folks from s/v Memory dinghied over on Thursday to say that "Providence" (Martin Carrierre) would be doing a market visit and a cooking session on Saturday morning.  After consulting with JP and Susan when they returned from their seven hour hike of a segment of the Waitukubuli National Trail, we decided to stick around on Saturday to participate.  The final dishes were a really delicious fish cake, that may be a bit too fiddly for the boat - though I think JP is pretty tempted to try it - and a stew that was billed as a "Callaloo" stew, but to my mind was really a very good island provision-and-chicken stew that used taro for its thickening, classic Caribbean flour-and-water dumplings, and, somewhat strangely by Trinidadian and Grenadian lights, ONLY the callaloo stems.  Martin's wife Flori showed us how to peel them - they were very long and thick, and the attached leaves rather aging - and then told me that they don't ever use the leaves.  I asked if I could have them, to supplement the ones I had bought in the market, and of course she said yes, but was rather skeptical that they were actual consumable.  The photos from the event are in a slideshow here: 

 

I did indeed use the discarded leaves, more picked over than usual because, as said, they were rather more elderly than I am accustomed to seeing in other places, along with some island spinach, to make one of our favorite soups.  This is a richer soup than you would find in many island kitchens; it came originally from Rosemount Plantation in the north of Grenada, by way of Ann VanderHoof.  One note - if you do use callaloo, do NOT put it in your mouth when it's raw.  It does not do permanent damage, but will feel like you have just eaten fiberglass - very unpleasant.

Recipe: Cream of Callaloo Soup

First prepared: Onboard Raconteur in Grenada, late 2011 or early 2012

2 T Vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 stalk celery with leaves, chopped
1 small cubanelle or green bell pepper, chopped
1 T chopped fresh thyme
salt and fresh ground black pepper
1 bunch callaloo, ribs removed and leaves chopped, or, if you are not in the Caribbean, about 1 pound of spinach, large stems removed
2 cups evaporated milk
1 cup vegetable stock (from cubes is fine)
4 whole cloves
a dash of hot sauce, and a squeeze of lemon juice
sour cream, creme fraiche, or cream

Heat the oil and add onion, garlic, celery and pepper.  Cook over medium heat until soft but not brown.  Sprinkle with thyme, salt and pepper.
Add callaloo or spinach and stir to combine.  Add the evaporated milk, the stock and the cloves.  Cook over low heat for 45 minutes.
Remove the cloves (if you can find them!) and puree the soup in a blender, a food processor, or with an immersion blender (my preference, both on the boat and on land).  Puree until fairly smooth, but leave some distinct pieces of callaloo or spinach.  If the soup is too thick, think with additional milk, stock or water.
Add hot sauce and/or lemon juice as desired.  Pour soup into warm bowls and swirl in a spoonful of sour cream, creme fraiche or cream.

This serves 4 people generously.

Yet another cooking blog

This is mostly a way for me to keep an electronic copy of a project I started a couple of months ago.  I started recording recipes that we consider to be our "repertoire" - though it has turned out to include both tried-and-true recipes that I have cooked for years, and a few things that we have tried and immediately decided to include in journal.  These are not original recipes, by any means, and when I know where they came from, and when I first made them, I have been including that information in the notes.  I'm only up to 18 recipe pages so far, partly because many of my go-to dishes are not really practical for preparing on Raconteur, and that's where I am now.  I suppose fittingly, the first two recipes are tropical cocktails, but the next one will be a French classic that I prepared last summer in Monaco.  These will have no particular order; I include things in the book as they occur to me, or as we prepare them.

Recipe: "Super Tyng"

First prepared: Somewhere in the Caribbean (probably Grenada) in early 2012

This is a new favorite of ours, after preparing many, many variations on many, many rum punches.  We like most of them, but this one really stood out because of the grapefruit.  I found it somewhere on the web, but I no longer know where.  By the way, Tyng is a (non-alcoholic) bottled soda that we find in Trinidad and in Grenada and try always to keep on hand.  For a no-labor cocktail, we drink rum and Tyng.  For this drink, all juices are fresh-squeezed; I have often said that the tool that gets the most use on Raconteur is the juicer; the thing I make most often is sugar syrup for our cocktails.

2 ounces dark rum

1/2 ounce lime juice

1/2 ounce lemon juice

1 ounce orange juice

2 ounces grapefruit juice

n.b. the first time I made it I used 4 ounces of a grapefruit/orange combination that was probably about 60% grapefruit; I have since made it with some lime and lemon juice thrown in, but be sure that it's a bit more than half grapefruit.

2 dashes Angostura bitters

2 Dashes Peychaud's bitters

n.b. I used 4 dashes of orange bitters instead.

pinch of nutmeg, freshly grated.
The original recipe says "shake - strain - serve over rocks in a Collins glass" and garnish with a wedge of lime.  I skip the straining part, and serve it on ice, but in our handy-dandy all purpose short glasses (which we now also use for wine, having ditched the stemmed glasses a while back).

Serves: 1 drink

Recipe: 'ti Punch
First prepared: Hmmm...in the Caribbean for sure, but I don't really know where or when.  We had our first one at Pointe Noire in Guadeloupe on our way south, in May or maybe early June of 2011.

On the same page in the journal, I also include the following, a recipe for 'ti punch - short for petit punch, a classic that uses rhum agricole, sugar and lime.  The proportions in this one are courtesy of Ann VanderHoof and her husband Steve Manley on s/v Receta, from (I think) her first book, An Embarrassment of Mangoes.

2 parts rhum agricole
1 part fresh-squeezed lime juice
1 part sugar syrup*
4-5 dashes Angostura bitters
pinch of nutmeg, freshly grated

Combine the rhum, the lime juice and the sugar syrup over ice, then sprinkle with the bitters and the nutmeg; sometimes we skip the sprinkled ingredients all together.

And here is some information about rhum agricole, on Ed Hamilton's Ministry of Rum site:


http://www.ministryofrum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39


*To make sugar syrup, combine a cup of water and a cup of sugar, and bring to a boil.  Once the sugar is dissolved and the liquid is clear, cool and store in the fridge for up to two weeks.