Michael Symon's Live to Cook_ Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen - Michael Symon [3]
Meanwhile, put the bread in a small bowl and pour in the milk.
In a mixing bowl, combine the onion and garlic and meat. Add the egg. Squeeze out the bread, discarding the milk, and add the bread along with the oregano, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a good teaspoon of pepper. Mix the ingredients with your hands until they’re all evenly distributed. I like to taste this mixture raw to check for seasoning (it’s delicious), but you can sauté it first if you wish. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use (up to 1 day).
Form the mixture into balls, a little smaller than golf balls. You should have about 20. Roll them in flour, shaking off any excess.
In a large shallow pan, add enough canola oil to come up to about a third the height of a keftede and heat over medium heat until hot (the keftedes should sizzle immediately upon hitting the oil). Pan-fry the keftedes, turning once, until just cooked through but still moist inside and with a nice crust outside, about 5 minutes (cut open if you’re unsure whether they’re done). Remove to a paper-towel-lined plate to drain.
Arrange the keftedes on a serving platter. Grind some fresh pepper over them, tear mint leaves onto them, grate the zest from the whole lemon onto them, and give them a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. Serve the lemon wedges on the side for squeezing on top.
A bell went off in my head when she said it. She was a cook at Michael Symon’s Lola, the most popular restaurant in Cleveland, working day prep and I was beside her as part of my reporting on Michael Symon for my book The Soul of a Chef. We roasted and peeled beets and red peppers, made the chocolate pudding, washed the arugula, sliced the red onions, grilled the portobellos, and prepped the artichokes.
She stopped moving and said, “You know what I like about Michael’s food? It’s the kind of food you can do at home.” She paused for an example but needed to go only as far as her countertop, to the artichokes, for her favorite dish: grilled halibut over a roasted artichoke salad with red peppers, basil vinaigrette, and preserved lemon. “I would never have thought to put halibut on an artichoke salad,” she said.
I thought, “Do-at-home food—exactly. That’s it.”
Symon’s food was interesting and satisfying and reliant on good technique, but in the end it was very simple food without pretension or self-conscious chefiness. A piece of fish over a salad, or with a little salad on top and a warm vinaigrette. Corn crêpes with some shredded duck inside and a little barbecue sauce. A chicken dish that was so successful he grew to despise it: he couldn’t take it off the menu because women threatened never to come back if he did. Rigatoni pasta tossed in a cream sauce flavored with rosemary and goat cheese (see here); if you have some leftover chicken, a one-dish meal comes together in the time it takes the rigatoni to cook. Anyone can do it, there is almost no technique whatsoever, and yet it is good enough to earn national accolades from the food media. This guy, this wrestler, this blue-collar boy from Cleveland … a Food & Wine best-chef award? Really?
I’d known Symon for a couple years before he sprang onto the national playing field. I had spent some time in the kitchen at his previous restaurant, but after the award in 1998 I could write about him for a broader audience. What was it about this guy that was so magnetic? What made his food both so good and also so seemingly simple?
One of the qualities of his dishes is their mechanical ingenuity, born of necessity in the chaotic bottom-line restaurant business. When you have nothing more than a shoebox kitchen and a six-burner range to feed two hundred people, you’re forced to think a little